Backup stratagies revisited

So after reading this guy's blog

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10536543

I'm thinking I should stop being so reckless. I have data spread over several drives, several partitions, which to me helps reduce chances of a catastrophic loss, but with the price of hard drives being so cheap, perhaps it's recklessness without good reason.

My proposal for large amounts of data to be backed up on an external HD that really only gets plugged in every time there is a backup to be done. I suppose this is pretty common sense to everyone, but I'm working this out for myself for the first time.

Optical discs strike me as a pretty bad way to backup. For a start, unless you have blueray, you will be backing up over many discs. But more importantly, they lose data way too easily. It's like having a piece of string as a backup to a seatbelt should it fail.... or something...

So, what's your backup strategy, and what software is good for the whole process?

1x QNAP Raid Array here
1x QNAP Raid Array at the datacenter

Both replicate to each other live

for personal data, decide just how much you want to back up. this gives you perspective.


movies, tv and music can be replaced. fuck backing up all that.

how secure do you want it? will a single external hard drive be enough? what happens if you get robbed or the house burns down? this is where an offsite backup comes in.


yes, optical storage is laughable.

also (because since Andrew mentioned it), RAID IS NOT A BACKUP. RAID is for redundancy in case of hardware failure. (well, 5 is, anything else is a different kettle of fish outside the scope of this discussion)


my personal strategy is fairly basic, i don't have much that actually needs backing up, and what does gets occasionally synced to some spare storage at work.

work stuff gets backed up to a backup server located in another physically separated part of the school (in case of the place burning down, unlikey that both buildings holding data would go), along with monthly offsite backups (to home)

I can't risk data loss, I keep data on two hard drives, one of them offsite. I bring it home after every significant event and run a backup using robocopy (free command line tool from Microsoft).

Rapidly changing files that aren't huge get backed up to MozyHome daily (2GB free). I can't keep my images there, I have something silly like 300GB of images on my active drive, with up to 40GB being active in any given week.



What if you accidentally push delete?

I dont. So I dont need to insure myself against it.

Well you're just special then! For people who aren't special having an offline backup guards against accidents, viruses, overwriting files, and plain old stupidity.

What if you press delete? Are you a fucken moron?

Having lost important stuff on occasion and having to help many people who have lost stuff im a little bit more careful than many.

Important stuff is backed up by robocopy to my file server (Raid5) and occasional off site storage (mums place) on a USB attached drive. I keep backups of family data as well.

I also email important documents (sometimes as a scan) to a separate email account which is helpful as i can get them from anywhere which has been useful many times.

Normal media i share as much as possible with friends/family.

I find that sorting data (mainly photos, uni work and documents as soon as i can make data backup very easy as the folder names and contents dont tend to change much. 'YYYY MM DD Title' is how i name folders with time based stuff like uni work, work projects and photos.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10536543&pnum=0

(which reminds me i use synctoy for work<>laptop as my computer isnt part of the domain).