I created a robocopy script that copied all my data to external drive. I do this full backup every month or so, then I take to work and keep it there, so it doesn’t get lost when my home burnes or computer is stolen.
For intermittent hard drive problems, I have RAID 5 built from 4 400 GB SATA II drives, so I don’t care if one of them blows up.
This seemed a little off to me:
“You don’t even technically need a second or third hard drive; if you have a large enough primary drive, Acronis will allow you to create a new, hidden partition to store a complete backup image.”
Backing up your disk on the same disk just protects you from user fuckups where you delete something you shouldn’t have deleted.
If your disk fails, and your backup is on that disk too, well…
I’m using 2 external disks at home with some bat files 
My MacBook+TimeMachine+external USB HDD
wonderful, easy, fast.
I just keep my fingers crossed.
My personal backup strategy is “back up data files offsite when they change meaningfully, and locally much more often”.
A live whole-drive backup is nice, but not worthy my effort.
Other people’s mileage, of course varies.
(The only things I’d lose if I lost one of my machines by itself, would be game saves or recent email - and I don’t care about my email nearly that much.
Now, a house fire, that would hurt more, but the important stuff, my music and longer-term files, would all be safe in off-site DVD piles.
Safe as optical media can be, at least, but there’s no guarantee a hard drive will work in ten years, either, in terms both of raw function and having a computer that can physically connect to it and possibly even read the filesystem.
When was the last time you even SAW a computer with an MFM connector? Or, for the old-time Mac users, unless you have a Mac Pro, how’re you going to connect an old SCSI drive to a modern machine?
Compromises all around, really. All flesh is grass, and all data is eventually toast.)
unison and cheap NAS also does the trick. unison runs with or without gui, so use it without gui and as scheduled task in windows.
i only backup data. with wpkg you can do automated installaion of the system again and again.
Backup strategy:
Windows Home Server + JungleDisk for WHS.
Set it and forget it.
The week before last, some undesireable got into my house and stole my laptop and my work laptop, much to my irritation and triggering a shortlived desire to kill everything within arm’s reach.
Fortunately all the data on those machines is stored in the following places:
So when I get a new one I just have to copy the data back again and continue where I left off.
The offsite backup strategy is so important now we’re all slightly obsessed with owning laptops. You can make mirror images of your HDD to hidden partitions and use the “undo” feature of your favourite OS’s filesystem… but it’s not much help if your laptop is in someone else’s house being erased and re-installed or sold in the local pawn shop.
So the offiste backup isn’t incase your house burns down, it’s incase someone steals your computer, or you lose it.
Just watch that incremental backups don’t cure against “user is a moron and deleted stuff without realising for a few days” disease. Your automated backup will faithfully propagate your error.
Windows Home Server makes a good in-house caching device for uploading to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Currently, I’m using the JungleDisk plug-in.
I have about 110 GB of data backed up remotely for about $15 a month.
Seem to work pretty well.
Christopeher Finke wrote: …base64-encoded little chunks…
LOL! But where /is/ your suitcase…?
I like the irony in the fact that there is hatred for windows users in the original reference. Another spiteful mac expert (http://wilshipley.com/blog/2008/01/macbook-air-haters-suck-my-dick.html) excoriates those who don’t like the fact that you can’t crack open a macbook air.
Guess you can’t backup that sumbitch, but you can still s*** his d***!
Vista has “Backup and Restore” capability. Look in the control panel.
Huge issue in South Africa is that we pay-for-use with bandwidth. You pay for xGb per month with DSL. This pretty much does away with offsite backups over the net - simply way to expensive ito bandwidth.
At friend of mine lives not too far away. I’ve setup a $200 WLAN with directional antennas and Linksys WRTs. We each have a spare (old) workstation at each other’s houses which are used as offsite backup. I don’t have a pressing need for a drive mirror with OS and everything, so we both have scheduled jobs which FTP new and changed files repeatedly. As soon as the job is finished, it starts again.
Works like a dream.
Backup strategy? What backup strategy? OH SHI-
I have become very paranoid about backups in the last year, having had lost so much data to disk errors or in some cases, stupidity. The problem for me is that I work with terabytes of image data. It’s actually getting to a point now where it’s cost-effective to use external disks for that volume of data, but in truth I have a system which is a hybrid of the above techniques. I mirror long term stuff to an external disk using synctoy everyday. I use jungledisk for smaller crucial stuff, like project files, and this also keeps six months worth of revisions. The CVS I use (which in itself is a backup system of sorts) is backed up to LTO3 tapes once a month. And finally I use time machine, but this is purely for the system disk.
This is all good, but the problems begin again once your valuable data exceeds the size of your drives. Say, you work with digital video, you will regularly run into this situation. Then you can either replace all of your drives with bigger drives, or you have this whole mess with special backup HDDs, piles of DVDs that might become unreadable over time, etc.
I’m using rsync with a nice (self-written) script that at first wakes up the destination computer via wol and then backups different dirs.
It’s scheduled via crontab.
rsync is not like incremental backup.
It’s more like efficient full backup.
I.E. after you do the rsync you only have the latest version.
Here is the rsync command I use to backup over the company LAN:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/hard_disk_reliability/
One can do incremental backups with the rsync protocol using:
http://rdiff-backup.stanford.edu/duplicity.html
http://www.dirvish.org/
I find doing a full backup from my laptop to external disk
is more flexible using tools other than rsync:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/systems/usb_backup/
Regarding SuperDuper! for Macintosh, please bear in mind that it’s still not Leopard Compatible (Dave is working hard to make sure it works). Alternatively you can try Carbon Copy Cloner (google for it) which will do the same (for free), yet with less features.
For Windows, I have been using SyncBack for ages and it just works. I use the freeware version: http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html but there’s a more powerful version available.
It’s funny that nobody mentioned the most basic backup tool available in Windows: “ntbackup”. For all intent and purpose, ntbackup just works.
NTBackup can backup and restore Windows System State, Registry Clusters, Active Directory, Exchange Server Databases, it supports Volume Shadow Copy (VSS), ASR (Automated System Recovery) and can use tapes easily. It’s also easy to schedule and script via the commandline and can perform Differential, Incrementals and Full backups. NTBackup is just like the UNIX dump(backup/fbackup/mksysb etc) commands. Powerful, always there and always ignored.
The good part about ntbackup is that most systems have it (and you can get the .msi for the others), so restoring shouldn’t be an issue.
If you are using Windows Vista Windows (Business, Enterprise or Ultimate), Complete PC Backup and Restore will works similar to Norton Ghost along side Automatic Backup and System Restore.
I should also note that rsync (or ROBOCOPY) are NOT backup tools. rdiff/rsnapshot/rsync with snapshots or rsync-snapshot do come closer to that concept though. Just cloning files isn’t enough. You need to archive and store them (or use a snapshot capable filesystem).
Also, you shouldn’t rely on just one layer of backups. You don’t need something like bare metal recovery (eg: Ghost) to restore just 1 deleted file. You don’t want to wait 8 hours to restore a disk image just for a failed disk. It’s a combination of high availability technology (RAID) with file backup features like VSS or System Restore , your backup server / media that will backup individual files and the bare metal recovery media (stuff like Acronis, Ghost, Windows Complete PC Backup, etc).
Just a word of caution though: backups aren’t important. Restoring them is what counts :-). So it’s generally a good idea to test your backups, see if they actually do what they’re supposed to. Create a backup policy, test it then stick to it.