How do you back up your personal data?

[smatty]

Cheap NAS (readynas) running RAID & business stuff is also backed up to a few locations in truecrypt volumes.

Got loads of photos & raw files so online backup would be fairly expensive. Probably ought to stop being tight and cough up for it as a home fire would wipe the lot out.

[Mr.Whippy]

8TB RAID'd FreeNAS which is rsync'd a couple of times a day to another 8TB RAID'd FreeNAS at my parents over a VPN.

[xoggoth]

These Maplin Core hard drives are good. Some say they are refurbished laptop drives but have found mine very reliable. Use with freeware fbackup 4, v fast. I couldn't believe the backup was working properly at first, but it always seems to have done.


640GB CORE External Portable USB 2.0 Hard Drive : Portable Hard Drives : Maplin Electronics

PS They come up to 3Tb, £99.99, search for Core by CnM

[proggy]

Dropbox + Infinty2 Broadband

If you backup to a NAS what happens when that goes down or you house burns down.

[SimonMac]

I have a NAS - 6tb, a Sun Ultra 45 soon to be filled with 4 3tb disks, and offsite Crashplan unlimited storage, about 3tbs uploaded.

Yes - I lost the missus' pics from when she worked in Berlin....

Aren't they still here girlsgonewild.de

[BolshieBastard]

Hi everyone

Absolutely devastated the external hard drive I had packed up and I lost photo's and other bits, the photo's being the most important thing on there as they're of the little one. I managed to recover 10% of them with TestDisk before the HD died completely a small consolation but at least I save some, what I want to know is how the masses securely and reliably back up there data in order to avoid such calamities? Normally I have them on one of the laptops too but I took them off when I wiped and forgot to put them back on

Save important stuff to 3 separate entities in addition to a pc \ lappies HD ie your personal cloud space, a USB stick and an external HD.

Use the cloud to regularly sync stuff.

As an alternative, if you're super conservative and dont trust the cloud, 5 or 6 usb sticks arent expensive and you'd have to be exceptionally unlucky to lose them all or to be unable to retrieve data from all of them.

Just remember Occam's razor.

[d000hg]

Just remember Occam's razor.

The simplest explanation is usually the best?

Are you sure you don't mean Murphy's Law?

[Platypus]

I'm PC based so My Documents on Drive C is copied using sync software to Drive D which also hold stuff such as photos (total of 1TB). This drive is then synced to a 3TB drive which also holds daily backups of the complete C drive for the past week. This 3TB drive is then sync'ed to another pair of identical 3TB drives.

My Documents also copied to Dropbox and Google Drive. But not my photos. This I must fix!

So my critical work-related docs are on 5 local hard drives and 2 cloud locations. My photos are on 4 local hard drives.

I'd never ever use an external HDD to back up anything! Have you read the reviews on Amazon? There is no such thing as a reliable HDD and you should not keep anything on any HDD that you cannot afford to lose (unless it's backed up).

[The Spartan]

There is no such thing as a reliable HDD and you should not keep anything on any HDD that you cannot afford to lose (unless it's backed up).

Got that right devastated is an understatement, I'm going to put a copy on each of the 3 laptops, a pendrive and in the cloud after this experience

[doodab]

I have several "primary" hard drives, these are backed up to other hard drives, so I have the original and two copies of everything, one of the copies lives in a secure storage unit along with several bicycles and some other stuff that I don't know where it came from but I can't throw it away just in case I need it.

I actually lost everything due to a HDD failure many years ago. I was upset at the time but in retrospect it was very liberating.