Data backup survey - What's your strategy?

[Steve]

I suspect that most people don't have any backups of their data in case of hardware failure, an accident, theft etc. Ideally you should have backups stored in at least 2 locations.

 

I only have local backups at the moment, which isn't the best strategy, but I have too much stuff to upload to the cloud. I have 2 external hard drives for backups. One contains an image of my system drive, so I can quickly restore my computer. I update that once a month after installing the latest Windows updates. The other contains a backup of all of the data I would hate to lose (all of my digital music, some videos, some other personal documents) and I update that once every 2-4 weeks, although I should do it more often.

 

I also have backups of tons of stuff on optical discs. A ridiculous amount in fact.

 

[preach mode]Not keeping a backup of data is stupid. You are effectively saying "I don't care if I lose this". If you have no backup strategy at all, then get one![/preach mode]

[doppelkorn]

OK, so what's the best remote backup option? That's what I need. Like an external HHD at my parents' house hunderds of miles away where I can run an automatic backup to every week or so.

[Steve]

If you don't have huge amounts of data to backup, then cloud-based services are a great option. There are some that allow you to run a client on your PC, so you select the drives/folders that you want to backup and it's done automatically and most offer schedulers so that you can choose when the backups occur (if you don't want your bandwidth to be used during the evening, for example). When new files/folders get added to the directories/drives you've selected, or if files change, then that stuff is automatically updated so you never have to really think about it once it's initially set up.

 

You can do it with an external hard drive connected to a remote computer too, but it's a bit harder to synchronise as you have to make sure that the PC at the other end is on and that the hard drive is connected. You can use the CrashPlan software to do this (although there are other options too) for free: -

 

http://www.crashplan.../crashplan.html

[Jon]

I currently backup to an external hd but I'm considering backing up my music library to dvd data discs as I know so many people who have had external hds die on them.

[doppelkorn]

That sounds good Steve. What would you define as "huge amounts"? The only fiels I care about are my music and I reckon that runs to about 10GB. I'm not massively bothered about snapshotting an image but if that's not a big issue I might sort that out too.

 

If I decide to go freelance (translation) I'll definitely start taking backup seriously.

[Steve]

I currently backup to an external hd but I'm considering backing up my music library to dvd data discs as I know so many people who have had external hds die on them.

 

There's no harm in doing both, but the chances of both hard drives dying at the same time is very slim. If a hard drive is going to die, it's usually DOA, dies in the first day or two, or it chugs on for a long time before eventually failing. If you're only using the external for backups, then it's not getting a lot of use.

 

Optical media uses dye which has "pits and lands" burned into it by the laser of your burner. That dye can deteriorate over time. If your burns are borderline quality to begin with and the media you use isn't of good quality, then you can find that optical media becomes unreadable in a relatively short time.

 

Doing both is certainly better than doing one or the other just because having an extra backup is never worse, but when you weigh up the odds of both hard drives dying at once and leaving your data completely unrecoverable, I do wonder if there's much benefit in using optical discs. As a regular DVD only holds about 4.5 GB of data, it can take ages to backup your collection too, although Blu-Ray is a good option (albeit a more expensive one).

 

That sounds good Steve. What would you define as "huge amounts"? The only fiels I care about are my music and I reckon that runs to about 10GB. I'm not massively bothered about snapshotting an image but if that's not a big issue I might sort that out too.

 

If I decide to go freelance (translation) I'll definitely start taking backup seriously.

 

10 GB is nothing really, although depending on the way BT restricts your connection (as I know you only have a 10GB monthly limit) you may have to do it in stages initially to avoid using up all of your monthly allowance. For that amount of data, I would definitely go with a cloud based option though. There's a good guide here that compares some of the services available in the UK, including free ones: -

 

http://crave.cnet.co...guide-49302944/

 

As for the image, it's a really good idea to keep one of those locally as you can restore your computer to the exact state it was in when you made the image in just a few minutes. It's not absolutely vital, but it can save you a lot of hassle as over time you'll have installed a lot of software and tweaked loads of settings and stuff, so it's much faster than doing a fresh install of Windows and then having to get everything set up from there. Obviously, you have to make sure that your computer is in a good state when you make the image, cos if there's any viruses, spyware, buggy software etc. on your system, all of that will be restored when you restore the image. Also, imaging software can only make images of drives/partitions, so if your OS, programs and data are all on one drive, you'd have to make an image of the lot. If you don't have a huge amount of data (which you don't appear to have), that's a really good thing to do in combination with your cloud backup, cos you have a local backup of everything that can easily be restored in one go, then if something happens to that, you've got the cloud as a backup.

[Jon]

A friend of mine, who treats his gear really well, lost two hardrives in the space of a week. I just don't trust them in the long term, whereas a DVD (if stored well) will last much longer.

[Steve]

Statistically, on average a burned DVD will not last as long as a hard drive, in terms of all of the data being readable from the media. Obviously, it is possible for 1 hard drive to die, then for your backup to also die before you've had time to copy the data off it, but the chances of that happening are very slim. Like I say though, doing both is better than doing one or the other so I'm not saying don't do it, but if I was going to choose between them I would use hard drives over optical media.

 

Also, when I talk about using a hard drive for backups, I mean using it only for backups. Some DJs have music on their desktop, then they have an external with their music on that too, but they're constantly using the external for DJing and the more its used, the more chance it will fail.

[Chris]

I'm very much on the Apple teet when it comes to backup. My phone and iPad are backed up in iCloud, my music on iTunes Match, and my iMac is connected to an external drive with Time Machine. I also sync my documents folder to Dropbox, which means that not only is the entire folder duplicated on my MacBook and iMac (and thus Time Machine) but it's also stored externally. My documents folder doesn't contain everything, but it does have the most valuable stuff in there.

[Steve]

^^That's the way to do it man.

[doppelkorn]

Steve Jobs did not die in vain!

[Deft]

I manually backup some folders onto a couple of separate hard drives. I always thought about getting a proper RAID setup but never had the inclination to shell out for 2x 2TB drives at once and do a proper job of it. I don't bother taking images of my install drive anymore, I used to do this religiously - but I rarely fuck about with my PC enough to want to re-image it and if my main drive blows up I will chuck this piece of shit Dell in the bin and buy an iMac. WORD.

[Guest Symatic]

thing is with cloud storage is that whjat happens if you backed something up, then wanted to retreive it in 20 years only to find out that cloud storage company went bust in the next credit crisis?

[Tbtf]

I have an unraid NAS server, its the best for protecting against data loss. And I also use it to stream movies for my four htpcs throughout the house its great!

[Gizmo]

Being Apple centric, I make use of the cloud for iPhone backups as well as doing it locally. But I have separate time machine backups for my iMac and Macbook Air. The power goes off on a regular basis here and fried one Macbook without a decent backup. Not letting that happen again.

[Deft]

I have been mulling this over again recently. Steve - you got any tips for a seamless backup style. I have main Dell PC, single partition - 1TB, 150GB used. I have external USB drive - 2TB, 500GB used (videos / photos / audio).

So the obvious thing would be to get a 2TB external drive number 2. Hence I should make an image of my Dell PC, and just back up the whole other 2TB drive. Presumably, making an image still allows me access to extract files should the Dell PC explode. I have a proper license for Acronis TrueImage 11 that I used years ago. Would this do the trick in an automated sense. I should check myself really.

[Vet]

I'm starting to use this asap:

 

www.backblaze.com

[Steve]

I have been mulling this over again recently. Steve - you got any tips for a seamless backup style. I have main Dell PC, single partition - 1TB, 150GB used. I have external USB drive - 2TB, 500GB used (videos / photos / audio).

So the obvious thing would be to get a 2TB external drive number 2. Hence I should make an image of my Dell PC, and just back up the whole other 2TB drive. Presumably, making an image still allows me access to extract files should the Dell PC explode. I have a proper license for Acronis TrueImage 11 that I used years ago. Would this do the trick in an automated sense. I should check myself really.

 

You can mount images created with Windows and extract individual files. I did it fairly recently when for some reason, all of my contacts disappeared from my email client and I mounted a backup image and extracted the file I needed to restore them. I would assume it would work the same way with Acronis.

 

I like Cobian Backup over the built in Windows backup, but it's best for backing up folders/files/drives that are kept separate from the OS/programs. You can use that to do a full backup of everything you select initially, then do incremental backups from then on which only backs up files that are new and files that have changed. It has scheduling and you can create tasks that are completely automated.

 

I suppose it depends what you want to do. If you want to be able to restore the entire PC - OS, settings, files and all - then an image is the way to go, but I think you would have to create a full image each time you do the backup, but with 150GB that wouldn't take long. I have a separate partition for the OS/programs so I keep an image of that (created with the tools built into Windows 7), then I use Cobian Backup for all of my data files as then I can do incremental backups which speeds things up a lot.

[Jon]

Can anyone recommend me a good external hd to use as a time maschine for mac? I think I need to reformat my laptop's hardrive and I my current external hd won't mount on my laptop anymore. I'm looking for 500gb and can't afford solid state at the moment.

[Steve]

What size do you need? Are you only going to use it for backing data up from a laptop?

[Jon]

Sorry I think you must have seen my post while I was mid-edit. I'm after a 500gb external drive to match my laptop's 500gb hardrive. I think at the moment I want it to just be a timemaschine for my laptop.

[Steve]

One thing I forgot to ask - what ports does your laptop have that you can connect an external drive to? Does it have USB 3.0?

[Jon]

Firewire800, usb 2.0, thunderbolt Cheers mate!

[Steve]

No USB 3.0 is a bit of a shame. You can get Thunderbolt drives, but they're a lot more expensive and there's little choice. Unless someone can come up with a better suggestion, I would probably go with a WD My Passport Edge drive. There's a 500GB model that costs about 60 quid. It's nice and small (the drive inside is only 7mm thick), the case is all metal, it has USB 3.0/2.0, and as the drive inside is 2.5" it's powered via USB and doesn't require its own power supply.

 

Here's a review of the Mac-specific version: -

 

The WD My Passport Edge for Mac 500GB is a fast and stylish portable drive, embued with category-defining build quality and attractively slim dimensions. This covetable piece of storage technology is also competitively priced given its performance and supreme finish.

 

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews/storage/3412148/wd-my-passport-edge-for-mac-500gb-review/

 

They charge £10 more for that one, but I'm pretty sure that the only difference is that it's pre-formatted for Mac and is silver around the edge instead of black. You could buy the regular one and format it for OS X yourself and save the tenner.

[Jon]

Cheers Steve