Today is World Backup Day
worldbackupday.com
worldbackupday.com
We're an online backup service that provides completely unlimited storage, external drive backup, versioning, etc. for $5/month. (And we're the Presenting Sponsor of World Backup Day.) We also open sourced our 135 TB Storage Pod for anyone to use.
If you're not backing up - please start! (Using us or something.) If you are, please help your family and friends who almost certainly are not.
Since we've got the Backblaze folks knocking around, here's the bits where I think it could be improved:
1. The initial backup can take weeks, and during that time tends to either saturate the ADSL line, or, if you throttle, runs too slowly to make decent progress. This is obviously a problem with any remote backup solution but it is also big pain point. I Wonder if you couldn't hook up with local providers with mega-lines (Apple stores for example, or some other large chain) where you could go do the initial backup for a fee.
2. I found restoring an older version of a file unintuitive - it would be nice to be able to see a history of changes per file.
Alternatively, a "day / night" setting, which is what I did manually during the initial backup: Throttle it during the day and put it on full speed at night. It's a bit of a pain to do manually and I'd regularly forget.
Out of curiosity, why is this? Are there copyright issues involved?
robocopy.exe /MIR <source> <target>
Create a scheduled task, set your external drive as the target, and forget. robocopy.exe is a built-in utility for Windows 7 and can be freely downloaded for via the resource pack. Also consider an offsite solution such as Windows Live Mesh for the free 5GB to create offsite backups of the most important folders. Never know when a catastrophic event (theft, fire) can take out your backups.
Ditto if you screw up - you have to catch it before the next backup otherwise you're boned.
Alternatively, for syncing and not real backuping (no timestamped snapshots, for example), I've used FreeFileSync[1] successfully in the past.
Throw TrueCrypt into the mix, and you've got a pretty good and secure backup.
Arq is a good backup-to-cloud service if you're conscious of where your data goes(S3) and who has the keys(Only you).
They're both indie programmers out of Boston too, which may be some of my bias, but check'm out!
Backup to me (and most others that I've talked to) means "I can restore all my data, my entire hard drive, and be back to where I was yesterday, so if I screw up my kernel tonight, I can just use the backup to revert to my pre-kernel hacking spree".
(to an average joe, it means the same thing, but not as much detail)
While I use the Win7 backup system on my WS it does make me feel a bit uneasy, I feel I have no control over it whatsoever. It doesn't do incremental backups. I have no say in how long they should be stored, the backups are stored in a weird way with hundreds of zip-files and I've found no easy way to browse them or restore just a lost file and I haven't even dared to use the restore options because I feel like I'm going to blow something up (so maybe you can do that, but the UI is just bad). Also I get no report that a backup was successful or if it has failed and I can't tell it to delete old backups).
I've used Acronis True Image before and I really wanted to like it but... I used it to, among other things, back up some network drives. All was fine and I got confirmation that everything was fine every week, but one day I skimmed through the logs and found out that the network drives hadn't been backed up but Acronis still said that the whole operation was a success. I can't even begin to comprehend the absolute lunacy about ignoring some failures in a backup program. Maybe they've fixed this now but they have a long way to restore my trust.
Also when doing incremental backups you can not anywhere state that I wan't a complete backup after x incremental backups. You have to manually move the old backups to force it to do a complete backup again, and it won't delete backups older than x months/years so you have to manually clean up or else your backups will constantly increase for all eternity. This should be about the third or fourth feature you implement in a backup program and all it would take is like 10 lines of code and a checkbox.
So, still having a hard time to see how one couldn't be better than Acronis I stumbled upon EaseUS Todo Backup Workstation but you can't do incremental backups of your OS (seriously?), so I've resorted to doing incremental partition images but I'm mighty unimpressed by the GUI and I don't feel safe at all.
Seriously guys, this shouldn't be hard! I just want incremental backups of my OS (but a complete backup after x incremental backups and auto-delete after say 2 years), easy to do a complete restore or just browse old files and a working reporting system (even mail will be enough, just don't say everything is fine when it isn't). I can't imagine something being more simple than those basic needs and I've yet to find anything decent.
It would be nice to be able to take a daily backup for the last x days and then only keep one for every week for y weeks and then only keep one for every month for z months but I have completely given up my hope of finding something "advanced" enough to handle something like that.
That said, I would also love a backup system like what you describe. If it could also detect imminent HDD failure (say, the first bad sector pops up) and warn me that I need to backup my backups NOW. That would be splendid.
Furthermore, I don't really have anything to back up. Everything I actually need is stored on git/github, everything else is downloadable via torrents.
But there is no excuse in having a poor UI or neglecting important aspects of backups. I've always have had the feeling that "no one that developed this tool has ever used it for themselves for other than testing purposes". None of them I've tried have the option of deleting backups that are old automatically and everyone that has ever used a backup program will think of this when, after a year, their backups are getting somewhat big. It's so obvious it hurts my soul, and I'm about to trust them with my data? And perhaps even pay them to handle my data?
Just compare with all the numerous rsync scripts people do. Automatic deletion is among the first features you implement. And that isn't a weekend project, that is a coffee-break project.
In Microsofts backup tool you can get a list of old backups in order to delete one if you like, the list in which they list your backups isn't even sorted - not by date or size, just random (with no way to sort it). They have put no effort in it at all (I first thought that the backups for a few months was missing), the attention to detail (in all the software I've tried) is just nonexistent.
Why would you delete possibly old data if you are so rich the price of keeping infinite amounts of data doesn't even register? (or is less than the cost of losing data)
First of all, even though the disk prices may be getting lower and lower, the amount of data being backed up is growing (almost?) exponentially. This not only requires a lot of space, it's also getting more difficult to back up in a certain amount of time (you probably want your full backups to finish before starting incrementals). There are various workarounds for these issues (compression, snapshots, deduplication etc.), but none of them have really solved them yet.
Secondly, the disks used for backups are usually part of disk arrays and those are quite expensive and also require some administration.
Thirdly, disks are only one part of the story - tapes are not dead yet and probably won't be for a while. They are usually faster than disks (when streaming speed is achieved), cheaper per TB of storage, can be stored more efficiently etc. There are drawbacks of course, so bigger companies usually create multi-tiered backup systems combining all available solutions.
As for the deletion of old data - some data has to be archived/available for a long time in order to e.g. comply with certain laws, but in general one implements multiple retention policies, depending on the importance of data. Most likely you wouldn't want to store _everything_, not just because of the space needed, but also because you need to somehow catalog what is being backed up and this also requires substantial resources.
Acronis etc. might be large enough that feedback from such testing isn't of interest, but if that's the case that's just sad.
In any case a remote backup is a must. A local backup is also a good idea for a number of reasons, especially an image in order to get the OS and apps back up fast.
Although I've never done a full restore from it (I have about 1TB up there - for $4/mo) I restore files from it every so often and it's worked flawlessly every time (normally when I'm at work and need a file from my home machine).
You can then do occasional offsite or online backups of the entire Windows Home Server machine.
Also, most remote backup services allow you to restore files and folders selectively, so you just need to download a small amount if you're in a real hurry.
Onsite backup only covers you against the first two.
I have found that people tend to overvalue the value of their data to others and undervalue the value of their data to themselves. Having lost all my data in the third category, I can say I'm never going to bother with an onsite backup again; it's simply a false sense of security.
Oops, looks like I forgot
\slow grin\