I need to get organized and start backing up my laptop regularly.
I use my own folder layout. Hopefully, One Drive is ignoring my personal work files. I’ve heard bad stories about One Drive.
I need a data backup that lets me select folders and subfolders. I like being able to recover a single, corrupted or deleted file.
That old crap moment when you press Save in a Word Doc with screwed up formatting. Ideally, it would be nice to right click the mouse and see saved versions to restore. Maybe it was modified Jan 3, 7, 9, and 12. I want to remove my errors and go back to Jan 7.
Incremental backups are better. My Internet is sometimes sluggish. There’s no need to backup a file that’s already saved on the server. Backup new and changed files.
How should a backup handle deleted files?
They are deleted locally on the hard drive. Where should they go on the server? How long should they stay there?
Do I need an image disc backup? Let’s say that blue smoke comes out of my laptop. I want to buy a new laptop and restore my drive as painlessly as possible.
My previously purchased software should be registered and ready to use. My folders and all the files should be available. Just like the hardware failure never happened.
Assuming you are using the Office 365 version of Word, OneDrive already does this and auto-saves continuously. You can revert to any point in time.
You can setup both Work and Personal OneDrive folders in the Office apps and Windows. Only the folders in each instance get backed up to that instance.
Buy an external hard drive and “manually” copy the folders you want to save on a regular basis. You might need to reorganize your folder structure to simplify this process to minimize the number of folders to be saved.
It’s trivial to write scripts to run every e.g. 5 minutes and back up anything in your folders of interest that’s changed in that time. The OP is/was in IT and this would probably be trivial for them. That’s definitely old school, and does nothing to make restoring point-click easy. But it can sure solve the problem of not having every version of every file of interest.
Probably not what you’re looking for, but I use a Synology back up drive with their software. You can easily set it to back up on whatever schedule you want it to and using a few different strategies. Plus, you can then set it to back itself up somewhere else.
And, since it also works as a server I set up a “My Documents” folder on it, with a shortcut to my desktop and treat it like I’d treat a local My Documents folder. Then everything goes directly to backup drive, but more importantly, when I get a new computer, I just put the shortcut on the desktop of the new computer and everything is right there for me.
Another feature that it’s designed to do, but I don’t use, is act like a cloud server, similar to Google Drive where you can work on the files while they’re on the drive. That’s confusing, what I mean is the way Google has it’s own suite of Office type apps (Google Docs, Google Sheets etc), so does this. But like google, it’s a proprietary format, so that was sort of a dead end for me WRT using it.
ETA because I saw your last post. WRT streaming, a lot of people use it as a plex server. Not something I’ve ever done or even looked at, but I see a lot of people talking about it and it does have a Plex Server app.
I use iDrive, which was highly rated by multiple sources when I researched backup options. It gives you 5 TB of backup storage for $70 / year, and lets you backup multiple computers. (There’s also a “mini” version that gives you 100 GB for $3 / year, but that’s probably too small for any real world use case). I’ve had to restore files a few times and it’s always worked fine. I’ve never tried streaming from it; I don’t know if it supports that.
