Open Thread: What's Your Backup Strategy?
We’ve talked a lot about backup options in past months. You can go offsite with a service like Amazon S3 or Mozy. If you’ve upgraded to Leopard, there’s the shiny new Time Machine. You can copy everything you care about to a second hard drive, burn CDs, or (if you have truly antique hardware) keep backup tapes. There are even hacks to let you use GMail as a big backup service.
With all the choices out there, what do you do to backup your critical data? Do you store redundant copies of data in your own office? Use one of the offsite backup services (which one)? Or are you living dangerously with no backups at all? We’d love to hear your backup success (or horror) stories, and why you’ve chosen the path you have. Share them in the comments!
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Important data on local hard drives is backed up to a NAT drive in my home. The hole in my backup plan is the photo and music library that lives in on the NAT drive. I’m not presently backing those up anywhere, and I need to fix that sooner rather than later. I used to copy them to a spare hard drive, but that drive got re purposed for another use. The plan is to get a USB drive to plug into the NAT drive, just haven’t gotten around to doing it yet. My son is getting a XBox for Christmas. Does anybody know if it would be easy to mirror the photos and music to the hard drive in the Xbox?
I’m reluctant to go online because of the volume of data. 50 GB is a lot of music and photos to copy up on a DSL line that rarely exceeds 768 kbs outbound.
Right now I’m using only Time Machine, but I plan to buy a second external drive soon to make weekly bootable offsite backups with SuperDuper (which is what I used before Time Machine.)
I only have 1 laptop computer that I use for Work and Home use. To backup, I have a BAT file that I run every few days (manually) and I back it up to an external harddrive that site on my desk.
On an event driven basis (e.g. client project ended or is at a transition point), I will manually backup the critical stuff to Amazone S3.
My upcoming plan is to continue with the BAT file for convenience, but add JungleDisk + backup software to auto backup to Amazone S3 more regularly. Nice thing about JungleDisk is that it can encrypt the data as it goes up to S3, so even no one at Amazon could read it.
I’m using a mixture of back to my mac to maintain mirror drives on multiple macs, harddrives with time machine, .mac (slow, limited space, but works great across multiple macs), google docs (for iphone access / reading on the go but max doc size is a pain), box.net (slick interface and fast, but limited space and not secure), and mac mozy (shouldn’t have paid for it –slow, inflexible and rarely works despite multiple version upgrades and lots of unresolved tickets with tech support… Works fine on PCs)
I use a couple things to backup my computers in my home office. I use MozyHome for my main development system so I can get my work offsite. I also use Acronis TrueImage to backup the handful of other systems I have here and back them up to external USB drives.
I’ve been using Time Machine on my iMac at home since upgrading to Leopard. On my ThinkPad at work, I’m using the Carbonite online backup service. It continuously backs up my files to a remote server, and offers unlimited storage space. Highly recommended.
I’m using a mix of external hard drives and Carbonite.
I use
(disclosure: I’m a programmer for SpiderOak)
We do distributed development using Trac and IRC to coordinate. I write Python that runs on Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu. I like SpiderOak, because they pay me, and because I can back up and restore across platforms in a secure enviromnment.
I use SpiderOak http://www.spideroak.com
(disclosure: I’m a programmer for SpiderOak)
We do distributed development using Trac and IRC to coordinate. I write Python that runs on Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu. I like SpiderOak, because they pay me, and because I can back up and restore across platforms in a secure enviromnment.
I back up my work documents once a day at 3 p.m. to offsite storage (my .mac account) via Backup on my Mac. At noon each day, I backup my personal documents the same way. Once a week (early, early Saturday morning), I backup my family photos and video to an external drive. I have the backup app Bandwagon running constantly to backup my iTunes music folder to offsite storage on Amazon S3. I’d love to find a similar service that would backup my photos/video to Amazon S3 also.