Following on from my HD question:
I currently back up my photo's and music to an external 3.5" HDD, and important documents to four different USB sticks. I do this as-and-when I remember.
I feel that I have probably been lucky so far.
Can anyone recommend a good system (I know I 'should' have three back-ups, with one somewhere else) and on what media?
Thanks again.
With USB sticks, yes, even reputable makes can fail without warning, generally not being recognised and therefore making all data inaccessible. Multiple copies are the only reasonably safe way to go with them.
I don't think you can beat mechanical hard drives at the moment. SSDs haven't been around long enough to judge long-term reliability. I have many backups on optical media, which is frowned upon, but I don't have any trouble recovering files from twenty years ago. Of course, optical drives are getting harder to find...
That's the problem with archives, not so much the media dying as becoming impossible to read. Many of my hard drive backups are IDE, I have two USB IDE adaptors, but they won't last forever. Happily, every few years I buy another drive or two for the extra space, so I have several retired drives of reasonable size. Keep more than one copy of everything, just to be on the safe side.
Worth a look if by some chance you've never seen this:
I back up music/images/video to pairs of External Hard Drives. I incrementally back up C:\ to Partition E:\ and to a USB stick.
I save MyDocuments and the Browser and Email profiles then restore the last C:\ image, then restore the just-mentioned three about four times a year.
I regularly compare the backup pairs.
And I still worry...;}
PA
I back them up to cheap SSDs, one of which I keep off site.
I also back them up to Amazon S3 Deep Archive, whoch is stupidly cheap.
I bought a big clunky dual Xeon processor HP Z620 from Bargain Hardware, close to £20K new, about £500 second hand. My main desktop backs up to it (using SmartSync Pro) every night on a schedule. Probably overkill but I always wanted a dual processor machine and that enabled me to have one!
The back up drives (SSDs as all my mechanical drives have now died) are exFat (see other post) so can be pulled and put in another machine.
I have no offsite backups which is a weakness.
I find backup to USB stick is usually frustratingly slow... but it is cheap. Not massively reliable though.
Well this is a deep question - much of which will be influenced by how much of it you have, much you care about it, and what sized bag of money you are happy to bludgeon the problem to death with.
Backup as a minimum needs several generations - i.e. you don't want to have to destroy your one and only backup to make a new one.
Backups needs to be automatic and frequent - so you can't forget to do them, and can't enjoy the bitter sweet feeling of relief that your file is recoverable, but it is also a month old and you have lost weeks worth of updates to it.
Ideally it wants to record multiple snapshots of changes to files. So not only can you get back the file you accidentally deleted, but also go back to the version of the file that you realised you corrupted a month ago and it has been backup up in its corrupted form many times since then.
A NAS based solution can make a relatively sophisticated setup - especially if you augment it with off site storage or cloud based storage. So give it multiple disks in RAID 1 (i.e. a mirror with data recorded on two or more drives so that if one fails you can swap in a new one, and not lose anything). Most NAS will also use storage space to keep snapshots - so you can easily go back file versions. The more competent NAS boxen can also backup to other things (like another NAS somewhere else, or to a cloud storage service like OneDrive, Google Drive, Drop Box etc, and also to cloud based storage "buckets" like Amazon S3. (their S3 Glacier Deep Archive is only about £12/year/TB - but you might have to wait 12 hours to recovery your data)
You could also look at product offerings like Backblaze who offer a flat rate "unlimited" data backup for one PC for ~$70/year. (needs decent internet ideally, but they do have an option to mail out a HDD with your data on it if you need to recover significant amounts)
I don't trust myself to backup manually ("I'll do it tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow ... bu&&er the HDDs failed and my last backup was umpty-ump months ago") so am prepared to pay for something that just happens in the background. Currently I use an automatic backup service called Crashplan, but am looking for something cheaper ... all suggestions gratefully received.
They have been around long enough to know that *if kept powered on' they are more reliable than hard drives.
In use the data is cycled between blocks repeatedly and is therefore refreshed. Switched off the charge can decay out of the cells.
I run a short rsync (using Ubuntu) script every evening just before I go to bed. It backs up my mail and any changed or new files to my CCTV PC, at the other end of the house, and the files to a permanently-connected HDD. Occasionally I do the same to a different HDD.
Well, I use the normal windows based on an image and incremental backups with an occasional re image on an unpluggable drive. I have two 2tb ones on different machines and both are wd. I've had no issues with those. Of course if you want to pay, then get a dropbox account big enough and then you have cloud back up as well. Win10 seems to use their own one drive solution and of course there is google drive and if your upload speed is really fast these solutions work well. Brian
My PC has a SSD and two HDD. The second HDD is my E:\ drive.
I use Macrium Reflect Home.
Every night I backup my C:\ (SDD) and D:\ (HDD) to both the E:\ drive and my NAS. I run a full backup every week, with an incremental every day, staggering the full backups across the week and between destinations.
I have two USB drives, and back up to each of them alternately on the first and fifteenth of the month.
As I pay for Office 365, I get plenty of free online storage.
To put myself in control of what Onedrive does, on my E:\ drive I host a folder for all the files I want backed up to Onedrive, which is essentially a subset of our data.
I update this by copying from my active files (thus avoiding any issues with active databases) once a week. The program that has made this very much easier is FreeFileSynch
One other precaution I take is to have a separate "archive" backup, to my NAS, with a full taken every three months, and a differential every month. I automatically keep only three differentials, and weed out some of the full copies as they accumulate, so that I still have the ability to go well back, if necessary.
Chris
I use two Synology 918+ NAS boxes and SyncBackSE
As in how much ? (compared to say Microsoft 1-drive)
I don't know the Microsoft prices. But S3 Deep Archive is as follows. There is a 32kB overhead for each item stored.
- Upload is free.
- Storage is about 0.2 cents ($0.002) per GB/month in the eu-west region.
- Download is about 2 cents per GB, but the first 100GB per month is free.
There are some tiny other charges, but they are really tiny.
VAT has to be added on.
I omitted the retrieval request fees. You can have Standard (up to 12 hours delay) or Bulk (up to 48 hours delay).
Standard: 11 cents per 1000 requests, and about 2 cents/GB. Bulk: about 3 cents per 1000 requests, and .5 cents/GB.
When I looked at Amazon Deep Glacier a while ago I concluded I /might/ manage interface now; would very possibly struggle if I lived on; and would certainly be cursed ever more by 'er indoors should she survive me and want her data. Is it still a case of using their command line or writing code?
It can all be done on the web, although I find the command line better. I have scripts to do it all.
I have written a cheat sheet; you're welcome to a copy. Email me at snipped-for-privacy@lastname.cx
When you said that, I thought for a moment you were 'Huge', whom some people may remember; a grumpy guy who frequented this group for a long time. He's not so grumpy in person! I have known him since we were postgrads together.
He has been saying similar things about not being able to do things in the future, etc. With good reason. He has, for nearly two years, been suffering from progressive supranuclear palsy, which came out of nowhere. He is just getting a van which will take his wheelchair 'up front'. It's frightening how fast PSP moves.
Yes, I remember Huge. Thanks for the (sad) update on his health.
J^n
Many NAS boxes will have an "app" that interfaces with most of the cloud storages services which makes the process more "point and click"
(although you would need to be able get as far as the web management page for the nas)
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