What kind of back-up solution do you have?

Joined
Jul 14, 2008
Messages
9,842
Reaction score
1,793
Points
1,773
Location
Herts
*NOTE* not selling anything, just getting you guys to think about what you have and if it is safe!*NOTE*

Just for this summer I am working for a friend of mine who has his own IT company. Part of what he offers is a backup solution for customers.

Now we had someone come in today who had an apple mac, time capsule and all the right software (which comes with the mac) however he had no backups from about the beginning of this year.
This was because he noticed something was wrong with the backups (an error message popped up) but he took no notice and thought he would be okay.
His harddrive has packed up...completely...

:facepalm::facepalm::facepalm::facepalm::facepalm:

Anyways he is not okay and has lost a fair few months data :(


So got me thinking about what backup solution I have and how I could protect myself against a loss.
I did not start this day with a backup solution... :nono:

so I went and got myself one :lesson:
Personally I went for a bit of software called crashplan+
backups of every 15 minutes, it is to the cloud and also all my family's PC's including my laptop backup to my PC as another destination. This makes is faster to backup and restore.
Plus it keeps multiple versions of files, so if I / we make a mistake and think "oh dam I shouldn't have deleted/changed that file" we can just restore it from a previous version.


So for me I could have a house fire now and have everything in the house + all the PCs totally destroyed.

Then to restore all my data all I would have to wait for is to get the new PC hardware and then it would be as quick as my internet connection is. so not long at all.


Plus I would have a backup set of 15 minutes before the PC(s) was destroyed.

Not bad I think?

Just wondering what else you guys have out there?
Also just want to raise awareness of how important backups are and how much you don't realise you need them...until it is too late of course!

Was going to include a poll but thought it better if you guys gave a brief description of your backup solution, e.g. how often you have the backup run? every hour? every day?
And what you could survive? e.g. a house fire with all PCs / hard drives destroyed? or just one virus on one PC?
 
I used to backup some important files to a couple of flash drives and everything went on an external hdd. But I don't bother backing up anything anymore. However, anything of any value is stored somewhere else (old computers, mp3 player, steam cloud, etc.). I wouldn't be too bothered about losing everything stored on physical media but I'd be a bit miffed if my steam account got wiped out. I'm not a big gamer but there are a couple of titles I don't want to lose/shell out for again.
 
Last edited:
jp_bl_68 said:
I used to backup some important files to a couple of flash drives and everything went on an external hdd. But I don't bother backing up anything anymore. However, anything of any value is stored somewhere else (old computers, mp3 player, steam cloud, etc.). I wouldn't be too bother losing everything stored on physical media but I'd be a bit miffed if my steam account got wiped out. I'm not a big gamer but there are a couple of titles I don't want to lose/shell out for again.

No word documents or emails that you would be bothered about losing?
 
Main media centre is Raid-5 NAS on the ground floor. That backs-up everything overnight to another NAS upstairs. Then I use ElephantDrive to upload that each night to The Cloud - about 450GB of documents, photos and ripped music.

Used Carbonite in the past but that didn't support NAS drives at all - and some only support NAS drives if a PC is on. I use ElephantDrive as that integrates directly into the Qnap NAS so that it can work stand-alone. It also keeps old versions.
 
imightbewrong said:
Main media centre is Raid-5 NAS on the ground floor. That backs-up everything overnight to another NAS upstairs. Then I use ElephantDrive to upload that each night to the web - about 450GB of documents, photos and ripped music.

Used Carbonite in the past but that didn't support NAS drives at all - and some only support NAS drives if a PC is on. I use ElephantDrive as that integrates directly into the Qnap NAS so that it can work stand-alone. It also keeps old versions.

Pretty comprehensive then. :thumbsup:
 
I have a 1TB time capsule that backs up the iMac and the Macbook. I do monitor this carefully to ensure it's working though :smashin:

I also make the occasional DVD backup of important files.
 
I have a 1TB time capsule that backs up the iMac and the Macbook. I do monitor this carefully to ensure it's working though :smashin:

Indeed - I delete and re-create from the online backup a few random files every now and again to be sure it is actually doing something :)
 
Pretty comprehensive then. :thumbsup:

Yep well I have a lot of things on there I would be very displeased to lose - over a decade of photos, my company's documents, various software applications I've written, tens or hundreds of hours of cd-ripping. I like having a system where I can sleep at night :)
 
Well, sometimes I think backup anxiety can be a bit over blown, in the home environment. Most people aren't really generating much data at home - the odd document and media collections mainly. Most people are just receiving emails (often via the cloud), surfing the web and enjoying their media. And so there isn't much need for backups. For system files, you can always rebuild your PC from the original software disks.

On the other hand, for my purposes (and I regard myself as a power user!:D), I have two main strategies. My media is stored on two separate drives - one internal, and a network drive. For critical data files (and I really have some of those!) I backup to a network drive and the cloud, fairly regularly.

For the cloud, I use Microsoft Live Mesh and Skydrive. This synchronises specific folders to the cloud (continually). And is free - for 5gb.

For local file backups, like media files, or email archives, I use Microsoft Sync Toy occasionally. This does what it says on the tin, quite effectively for my purposes. Again it's a free download.

Admittedly, if my house were to burn down, I'd lose my drives and backups. But hey-ho, I'd get over it. But my critical data should be safe in the cloud.

But I suspect most "ordinary" people just burn a few DVD's of their most valuable stuff every now and then. Which is probably good enough for most.
 
I think the thing 'most people' have is family photos - they should be backed-up.

And I would dispute that burning DVDs is really any good at all - very fragile media.
 
No word documents or emails that you would be bothered about losing?
No. I've got my CV and a few receipts for large purchases stored in clouds but I doubt I need them any more.

Is that unusual?
 
jp_bl_68 said:
No. I've got my CV and a few receipts for large purchases stored in clouds but I doubt I need them any more.

Is that unusual?

For our house yes but for others maybe not.

Just know I have lots of uni work and mum and dad have lots of documents which would be a real pain to lose.
Plus photos.
 
GBDG1 said:
Put a few important things in dropbox. Most of the new work I do is in the cloud anyway, either webmail, google docs, salesforce.com (work), Facebook, Picassa, Flickr. Don't have any MP3s anymore, just use Grooveshark.

Be careful mate, dropbox is not a backup solution. I know it is very good for file sharing etc but do not think of it as a backup solution.
 
Windows Home Server backing up 2 PCs every day. It keeps backups for 5 days, 3 weeks and 3 months' worth. Awesome software!
 
Be careful mate, dropbox is not a backup solution. I know it is very good for file sharing etc but do not think of it as a backup solution.

It's good enough. It only needs to store things for the very small window between if a hard disk fails and the time it takes me to redownload those files. If dropbox fails then I have my hard disk copy. If my HD fails then I have dropbox. If both fail (which is pretty unlikely) then I can live without the things I've lost. It's not critical for my day to day life so I can't be arsed.
 
MS Synctoy to sync docs, music and photos across 1 pc and 2 laptops. Data on pc is then copied to seperate backup drive. Photos and docs are also on Google Picassa and Google docs. 5 copies of everything should be enough. Music bought from allofmp3.com and legalsounds.com which allow redownloading of purchased music.
 
I have recently just moved from a Windows system to a new iMac. I used to just back up my work files on a 500GB passport drive. This was almost full to capacity though, so I've bought a 2 TB desktop drive to utilise the Time Machine feature.

Never really considered cloud solutions, but might do for my photos when iCloud arrives.
 
Never really considered cloud solutions, but might do for my photos when iCloud arrives.

You can use Flickr or Picasa now. I would recommend Picasa over Flickr for disaster recovery since it makes downloading all your albums from the cloud back to your PC much easier than Flickr
 
Only thing that would worry me is photos, which I back up about once a month (if I remember :suicide:) I might look into Picasa, thanks for the tip :thumbsup:
 
Only thing that would worry me is photos, which I back up about once a month (if I remember :suicide:) I might look into Picasa, thanks for the tip :thumbsup:

Picasa also makes it easier to share photos. Unless they changed it since I stopped using Flickr but unless you had your photos set as Public, anyone like friends and family you wanted to share with had to have a Flickr account. With Picasa, you just email people a link. The free Picasa PC app is also impressive. It does one click image fixing for things like Redeye etc and also can do face recognition to automatically tag people in photos.
 
Picasa also makes it easier to share photos. Unless they changed it since I stopped using Flickr but unless you had your photos set as Public, anyone like friends and family you wanted to share with had to have a Flickr account. With Picasa, you just email people a link. The free Picasa PC app is also impressive. It does one click image fixing for things like Redeye etc and also can do face recognition to automatically tag people in photos.

Thanks mate. Is there a storage limit for Picasa?
 
For work I do nothing locally on my computer, everything is stored on a server and backed up daily.

As for home use I have a 1TB time capsule and back up every day, I would like to do some online backup but connection is abysmal and it would just take too long I think.

I'd be screwed if I had a fire or something at home but I would be more worried about other things than "is my data ok" if I were to have a house fire :laugh:
 
Thanks mate. Is there a storage limit for Picasa?

Think there is a 1GB on the free accounts but I pay Google for an additional 80GB which is shared across all their online apps. You can also upload videos as well so worth buying the extra storage especially if you shoot in HD or RAW.

When uploading, you can choose to upload the images at smaller sizes and while this is good for sharing, it's lousy for disaster recovery as you want to store the original high quality, large size original. The Picasa app lets you choose this when you upload.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

The latest video from AVForums

Is 4K Blu-ray Worth It?
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Back
Top Bottom