Backing up incrementally and/or important docs

Hi,
After noticing the Sandisk Backup thumbdrive at 64GB (yikes), I wonder how you guys go about the small incremental back-ups of documents, photos or what have you. I realise that all of us have a dedicated raid-setup and a strictly enforced back-up regime plus another hard drive in some other place so it wont burn in case of fire (right!?), but what about those dailies?

Use the poll to what you do, but also post how you would prefer to go about it.

Personally, I copy most of my files from my recorder, but keep them on the recorder, so that's a daily backup in itself. I try backing up to an external every day, but as we know, that doesn't always happen.

I am thinking of using an sdhc-card in the inbuilt reader (I come from Macs, so this is quite intriguing, lol) for the small but important stuff. And I do like the idea of a huge thumbdrive, although I'd prefer an external SSD – I'm just too cheap.

So, how do you do your dailies?



Mod Edit: Let's pretend we're all adults here and watch the language. K? I edited the poll to make it more kiddie friendly.

 

I have a file server that stores my documents. My laptop makes local copies of them that are synced whenever I come home. Essentially, it is an automatic backup system whenever I am within range of my wireless network.

If anything, I suggest you get a small external harddrive. Plug it in at night and have a backup program like Acronis run daily backups of your user data. It takes like two minutes max.

 

No, no, I wasn't asking how I'd do backups. I do have a NAS-drive, and a harddisk to back that up, plus a mobile harddrive which I do use when out and about (mainly because I need an external scratch disk).
No, I'm asking about what people do for those small incremental things, the "I better back this up right now, because if it's gone, I'm screwed"-kind of thing). I even sometimes use my audio recorder as a normal external harddisk, just in case.

 

Email. Off site, and and impossible to lose.

 

I use a Thecus N5200B NAS. It's quick and easy to get at and also I can easily upgrade storage without having to copy loads of files. Great survey! I'll be interested to see what people use. (rep given)

 

The misogeny in this quiz is apparent.

 

I use both an external HDD and SSD, though my network has NAS capability as well. As for fire - I'm a DriveSavers Agent, so I don't worry about it. If it's literally burned in a fire they can recover the data. If you're curious, click on the link in my signature and then click on the Forensics link.

 

I'd like to see them recover 24bit audio without fall outs, clicks and so on (i.e. still being useable for broadcast). I doubt that's even close to being technically possible – no matter how much you pay for forensics. But it's a great idea, nonetheless, and for other types of files it does seem like something worth considering.

 

Those who select the seventh option haven't had an HDD fail. It's dead simple to utilize ThinkVantage tools, and a chimpanzee could use Acronis (or similar) to perform incremental backups (at the least). Neglect taking backups and disaster's around the next corner.

Cheers,
~tdr.

 

So noone is using online storage?
Privacy issues? (which is my own reason for not even considering it).

 

I haven't found a decent enough automated solution that is online storage.

 

Today my HP Mediasmart Server running Windows Home Server backup 3 client computers nightly. Was considering the Jungle Disk Add-In for WHS for nightly backup of the critical parts of the server storage on Amazon S3.

Would this qualify as a decent enough solution?

 

I use a combination of the above options.

My main backup solution is my Desktop workstation. This has a RAID 5 array of three WD6400AAKS. It holds a copy of everything on my laptop, and is the sole copy of most of media files (all on the RAID array). I use Microsoft SyncToy to help with the synchronization of important files/folders.

In addition my active working set of documents is in several locations. I have an 8GB SDHC card in my laptop, a 2GB USB key, and copies on both my SSD and a few copies on my desktop.

I also have hundreds of CD-R/DVD+R with various stages of my documents, downloaded executables, and media floating around but these are generally out of date and too difficult to maintain.

This keeps me reasonably well protected from drive failure, but not very protected from a natural disaster and/or fire. However, many of my current documents are in my E-Mail or a similar online service.

I have considered online backup solutions, but I don't have adequate bandwidth to make any of them practical. I would be able to back up my documents (reasonably well backed up already), but backing up my media off-site would not work on my connection.

I have also looked into building a dedicated NAS/media server (Atom 330 or LV C2D/Athlon; Chenbro case; 4x 1TB+ drives) that would be optimized for low power usage (I could leave it on 24/7). However, I haven't found the right complement of parts to build it yet (Looking for an inexpensive Pico-ITX board with 4+ SATA and ideally an Atom330/Geforce 9400M embedded).

 

I don't back up on a daily basis, but I back up to my external hard drive every weekend. I just back up my Documents, Music, Photo, and Video folders, along with my internet bookmarks.

 

You boys just keep kidding yourself thar my comment had anything to do with backups.

I backed my t61p about once per month but never had an opprtunity to use it. I've recently discovered that I didn't specify the additional disks. I've come to the conclusion that it all depends on what i should have backed up for.

 

An obvious missing choice is backup server.

I am automatically backed up daily by my Windows Home Server.

Prior to that I was automatically backed up daily to a home server by Retrospect.

Backup involving regular human intervention doesn't work for me!

 

Wouldn't a backup server in effect be the same solution as a NAS-drive (if automated)?

 

I have always found that backups that are compressed and not accessible directly bothersome. I want to be able to go to the backup and get a file. And I want at least 2 copies.

I'm using Synctoy and have it daily backing up my W500 personal User folder (minus some temp files) to the desktop/server that is in turned backuped to an external USB. The W backups at 9pm when I'm almost always using it. I only slows a small amount for a few minutes. The sever is set for 2am.
Am I missing anything that needs backed? The emails and files I'm routinely work on appear to be covered. I can away reinstall office and other programs. And I have my recovery disks and a vista disk stored away.

 

I have several terabytes worth of eSATA hard drives that I keep off site and I synchronize these with my systems every week. These backups are in case my house burns down or I have an unrecoverable drive/array failure. In addition, I use some older retired hard drives to keep some 'long term' backups offsite; these aren't synchronized and are stored with quickpar files to ensure integrity. These help protect from viruses, corruption, or accidental deletions to some extent. I only backup data; I don't care about OS backups.

I also use RAID5 for most my production drives; this is irrelevant though since RAID is not a backup.

 

Persnikety,
I worked for VMS Engineering for twenty years. I backed it up the way I did becuse I thought it worked the way our sysrem worked. Much of wndows was copied from what we did.

By different disks I meant different partitions on the same disk. They are called "disks".

-Renee

 

I know they're called disks, hence me asking if you were talking about the "recovery disks" (i.e. the recovery partition so common these days).

 

No. I wasn't as I never refer to recovery disks, only to 'disks'.
-Renee

 

Okay then.
Then I don't get which partition (i.e. "disc") you backed up instead of what you should have, as you said in that post.

 

Your and my WHS backup won't work in case of disaster/fire though. See my earlier post for the automatic online backup of WHS I am considering. (Agree with you its got to be automatic to be acceptable.)

At $0.15 per GBmonth its too expensive to back it all up though. (Using 1TB out of 2 right now and will upgrade to 4TB when needed.) So first need to figure out the selection criteria for the automatic backup of WHS.

 

I use Acronis 10 to backup my T61p vista notebook incrementally every day to an external drive connected to a home server system running XP media center. That external drive is copied (using synctoy) once every two weeks to 2 other drives in rotation. Additional backups are created every few months and stored offsite.

I've not lost more than 24 hrs of data in many many years although I've gone through a lot of failed hard drives.

 

Raid 6 file server + online storage for documents. The raid has music/media.

 

I use jungle disk and really like it.

 

How do you decide on what to backup (and keep the monthly charges reasonable) and what not to backup? Automatic or manual decision?