What's your backup system at home?

I use a Buffalo Technologies Terastation and Apple OSX's Time Machine software to back up my machine. I also keep all of my music on it, since iTunes sees the Terastation as a shared music library.

I use the LaCie d2 Quadra Hard Disk external drive at both Home and Work. I have one in each location. I used Time Machine for awhile, but found out that it will delete older archives if the device needs more space. Unfortunately, older archives have older photos in them, and now my photos of the kids when they were younger, are gone. Thanks Apple for making this known to all, not. I discovered this and have now just been dragging and dropping my documents onto the Lacie and it works wonderfully. I really don't need to back up apps, so the drag and drop is just fine. And with the firewire 400 and 800 the transfer rates are up to 115MB/s** (eSATA).

More found here.

I use Time Machine for my primary Mac, but I also use Unison to sync between two Macs and one Windows/Linux netbook on my home network, so each computer is effectively a backup of the other.

Currently, I am using a 1GB USB hard drive. These are pretty cheap and work well. I have it shared so the other computers in the house can backup to it -- as long as my computer is on.

My next backup will be a NAS device. They are coming down in price and have the advantage that my computer doesn't have to be running for the other computers in the house to backup.

Both Mozy and Carbonite online backups advertise unlimited backups for one price. It's per computer, but cheap. That should do you if you want to go online.

I was always partial to the JWZ PSA on backups http://jwz.livejourn...om/801607.html.

The gist is either stop caring about your data, or get 2 drives that are at least as large as the data you want to back up.

Back up the data to drive # 1 every night.

Every month or two, back up drive # 1 to drive # 2, and then take drive # 2 and store it offsite. Like your office. Or a safety deposit vault.

Myself, I used to use this method (well, at least I had a drive I cloned my old mac to every night when all my data fit on one drive).

Now, I back up my iPhoto and iTunes libraries incrementally. I actually was just shown this today, I'm embarassed to say; I didn't know iTunes had a backup feature. File > Library > Back up to disc...

The way I made it work for both iphoto and itunes, is I made a photo album and playlist respectively, of the entire contents of my libraries. Then, I burned that to a DVD. Both programs are smart enough to ask whether you want to span such a job over to multiple discs, and it just burns them all in series. Then I date that set of DVDs and put them away somewhere. I don't save ALL my photo albums and playlists because that's not must-have data.

Then, I create a new smart album in iPhoto and a new smart playlist in iTunes, to display every photo or song/file etc imported after this date. I just keep an eye on the size of that album, and when it's big enough for a DVD-R, around 4.23 GB, I go ahead and burn it, and then create a new smart list for next time.

Sometimes I forget to burn the disc, but I have not had a failure yet, and I have a complete non-magnetic copy that should last at least a few years.

I should probably back up those to another set of discs and keep them at a friend's house, but I live on the edge.

If I was a professional photographer, I'd make two or three CD-Rs or DVD-Rs of every photo shoot and keep them all in different places. There is plenty of optical media indexing software out there. The design department at work uses DiskTracker to index all of the old job files on dozens of well-labeled optical discs. You just search for the files in DiskTracker and then it tells you which disk has the file.

We have Windows home server, and all our computers get backed up nightly. WHS is great, because it only saves the changes, which conserves space.

I use GIT for all my code and soon to be website stuff too. Then I copy on a regular basis to my offsite web hosting site (dreamhost).

For all my desktops I use mozy (mozy.com) and they backup all my key files (and some not so key) to their offsite location. And I just had to try a restore from them of some files and it worked very well.

good luck!

Windows Home Server + Carbonite.

WHS does a nightly image backup of all our PCs. We use it as a file server for music and videos and as print server. It's easy to add more storage just by throwing in another drive when the first one gets full. WHS binds everything together into one big volume (with optional replication of shares between drives).

It also makes a nice web (IIS is included), remote access (also included), and Subversion server (I use VisualSVN Server).

Drobo also provides a fantastic backup solution with single disk redundancy. There's even a network add on.

I have a 500 GB drive I plug into and let Mac's time machine back me up every so often. It's worked well so far, but I haven't had to do a complete restore from it.

I've been using Mozy for a while now. The initial upload is a little painful and time consuming but after that it's only incremental uploads. For $5/month it's hard to beat.

Since I use a Mac, I use Time Machine to run a constant backup of my system to an external 1 TB Western Digital drive. In addition, I use Mozy to do an off-site backup of all my documents. Programs, music, and media only go to the external drive. Since I sync to my iPod regularly I don't feel a need to send all of that stuff off-site. For the images, I occasionally do a backup to DVD that I store off-site. Doing this I can get a way with the free Mozy account to only backup my documents.

Lots of software solutions are listed here but you could build an array without much trouble.
If you just want reliability (and a little bit of speed) buy a second drive and mirror it.
If you want space and reliability buy two more (at least) and configure a raid 5.

Since I built my array in mid '08 I've lost 3 500gb drives and then after I upgraded I fell victim to seagates large drive problems and lost a 1.5 TB drive.

All the while my data was safe and available.


Most enthusiast en even some prebuild boxes come with a basic raid card that will do an easy mirror and functional but slower raid 5.

I have a couple of solutions in place, first off for most of my data I use Time Machine onto a Lacie 1TB Drive, this drive is then backed up onto a Lacie 1TB Network Drive using the built in USB 2.0 port, this automatically duplicates the data onto the drive ready for it to be restored onto a new drive if the original fails.

In addition to this all my non-multimedia documents are synced to MobileMe and DropBox. The only bit I have yet to master is how to backup my bootcamp partition and then be able to restore it...

Also - think I might invest in a new Drobo S to manage the backups for my whole household via a Mac Mini Server that I plan to buy very soon. Think that might just be the ultimate home backup solution.

I use SpiderOak. (Full disclosure: I'm a programmer at SpiderOak).

I keep two backups for my 500GB iMac. One is a bootable SuperDuper! clone of the complete disk, on a 500GB external drive. The second is a Time Machine backup on a 1.5TB external drive. I use TimeMachineEditor so that the backup occurs just once daily. The Time Machine drive is big enough to go back to February 2009 and still has about 400GB free. I keep a close eye on Time Machine and when that disk fills up I'll archive it and start another.

My solution is simply, I have a USB external drive and synchronize the file often.
I put all my important data files, backup of mails, subversion/mercurial/git repository (I keep my documents revision using Mercurial and TortoiseHg) under one folder , c:\synced_backup

For Windows machine, I use the SyncToy (free) tool to pair synchronize between my c:\synced_backup and (say) F:\synced_backup.
For Linux machine, could use Ubuntu One service, or simply similar folder synchronization (you will even have wider range of tools in the *nix environment, such as good ol' rsync, etc).
Using these synchronization, you don't need to see which files got updated, the synchronization tools will do it for you.

I use a bubba two server running Debian Linux, with a cron job that backs up each computer every three hours(different for each computer) via rsync.

Well....I had 1 iMac, 1 Windows 7 box + 1 Windows XP laptop + 1 PS3 + HP MediaSmart Server (running WHS). The WHS box would automagically backup all of my Windows machines no problem, and I had a 1.5TB external drive that I would backup the iMac via Time Machine to. However, I recently added a Macbook Pro, and am now experimenting with having both macs backup to the WHS box. HP has some software that comes with a Mac client. It works fine with one mac, but now that I have two, it has been acting weird.

The WHS console keeps telling me 'There are file conflicts', and it reports the Mac folder on WHS. I checked it and see nothing discernible, because what it seems happens is when I commission the space needed on the WHS, the HP software creates a virtual disk (according to the size I specify) and dedicates that portion to each of the macs. I googled the error messages and can't seem to find anything good. Has anyone had any problems with two or more macs backing up to a WHS HP MediaSmart Server?

My WHS box has 3.25TB of storage, but I am running out of space quickly (HD cam) and am struggling to figure out how to scale it so that I can keep redundant copies of all my home made videos, without having to pay $200 to AWS per month for remote storage. I know I can just buy another 1.5TB and do a sneakernet solution between my house and another safe location (where I backup the drive from the safe location every 2 weeks or so), but is there a more elegant solution that I have not thought of that would diversify all the major risks - i.e. one of the drives (or all of the drives) in the WHS failing at the same time and me losing everything, someone breaking into my house and stealing everything, or some major natural disaster wiping out everything. FYI, all of the above are real concerns that I have to address for my particular situation.

I also have Mozy on the iMac and Windows 7 machine, so I have the bare minimum in cloud backup, but that only works for about 100GB of my data. That doesn't cover the 650GB - 1TB of videos & pics (and growing fast) I have on my WHS that I want redundant copies of.

Sorry for hijacking the thread, but I just saw this question and it has been something on my mind for the last few weeks, so I figured I would jump in

Thanks.

I approach the backups at home with a multi-tiered approach for my Mac systems.

1) Daily or hourly incremental backups to a Time Capsule using Apple's Time Machine feature (or you can use a third party external drive too instead of a Time Capsule).

2) Weekly bootable backups of my system disk to an external drive which is actually two drives in a housing with a RAID 1 configuration to protect the disk. I use the great utility SuperDuper! to do the back up. CarbonCopyCloner is another good option.

3) I backup my Home Directory monthly to a Netware ReadyNAS Duo configured with RAID 1 to protect that disk. I use the utility SmartBackup for this. Another good option would be ChronoSync.

4) I will be getting a Crashplan account for offline backup and will seed the account with a hard drive sent to them so I don't have to wait for weeks to back up my stuff over my internet connection.

Finally, I have a lot a video projects and other important files that I offload to a Drobo which uses its own RAID system to protect the data. These video projects live on external drives and are collected on the Drobo for protection. So I have a copy aside from what is protected on the Drobo.

There are some good Time Machine utilities such as Time Machine Editor for those who don't want to have things backup up hourly. I usually do a once a day backup in the AM when my machine boots up then I don't need to worry about the backups affecting my network or computer system.

Hope this helps. I know this is geared towards a Mac system, but it can certainly apply to PCs too. I've seen too many people slack off on backups and eventually you will pay the price somewhere along the road. Its worth the investment and effort so good you are asking this question here.