Always Remember Family Backups
cs.uni.edu
cs.uni.edu
With software like Time Machine, an on-site backup is nearly automatic, and I've had an archive up and running on a separate server for the past two years. My next step is putting together an off-site backup system, in case of fire, burglary or natural disaster. My plan is to buy a couple of spare drives and leave one at an out-of-state family member's house, rotating them out when we visit for holidays.
If you used to augment your full backup though, it would be a good last resort, failsafe backup
I rented a safe deposit box at my bank, and every month or so I head over and get access to it to swap out my hard drives with the latest backup. That way even if the house burns down, etc., I'm covered.
It's low-tech, but it scales quite well. I can store multiple terabytes at a secure, offsite location for about $50 / year.
Then this software would automate this so that anytime I add new pictures/videos, it would automatically go to the external HD. Anytime I create/update a word doc it automatically gets uploaded/synced to Dropbox. Perhaps the backup software could watch certain folders and automate the backups for me so I don't even have to think about it. Heck I might even pick-up C# and learn me some Windows programming.
Maybe Dropbox needs a family plan?
Besides Drobo, anyone have other suggestions?
It'll back up whichever folders you choose to your own S3 account, which is very fast and reliable. It backs up and restores all Mac metadata corrrectly, stores versioned backups (like Time Machine), fully encrypted, has drag-and-drop restore, de-duplication, no limits on file sizes or drive types.
I often mention Tarsnap here, but I do my best to make sure that people understand that I'm somewhat biased when I espouse its benefits.
My current concern is off-site backups. I have none, and need something. The problem is that I can't backup the BackupPC pool (~700G of backups) and since I'm horrible about determining what to save and throw away I end up keeping everything. I think I'm hosed :)
No.
I think I would screw up. In fact I know I would screw up because when I used to do that I would forget every few weeks and eventually I didn't bother because it was a hassle.
Talking about backups are funny. We all like to talk about how we should have a great system, but for the vast majority of people if they simply had one automatic local backup they would be so much better off it isn't funny.
When my mom's pc died her super backup system (one hd at home one at work) was months out of date. When my dad's mac hd died he got a new hd, and restored from the Mac Time Capsule overnight. They both have macs now*
As much as I would like to advocate super backup solutions I feel that anyone that actually has a local solution that is automatic and runs is way better then someone who is preaching about making a more complicated backup solution. When people talk about back solutions someone always comes along and says how you really need to have two solutions, one local and one remote. If even one person doesn't backup at all because they tried to implement a dual backup and found it too hard then the original person has caused more harm then good.
*For many reasons including the backup one.
Where I disagree is with the idea that remote backups are more difficult than local backups. Even ignoring all the people with only one computer at home, for whom a local backup typically means a usb stick or CD/DVD, arranging off site backups is now at least as easy as on site backups.
Granted if you're dealing with hundreds of gigabytes of data you may encounter some problems but the vast majority of people are dealing with far smaller amounts of data.
is it just me who does this way?