What method(s) of Backup do you use for your primary home PC?

[Oyeve]

DAT.



J/K

 

[Kippa]

External hard drives
External SSDs
and
Cloud

 

[Chaotic42]

In cascading order:

-3TB spare drive in my main system
-Dedicated 4TB in RAID 1 system which only turns on for backups
-Thumbdrives in a safe
-Blu-Rays in a safe

 

[Red Squirrel]

Curious has anyone looked into LTO tapes, is it viable? The older drives/tapes seem cheaper, but are you locked into a specific manufacturer and do they still make tapes for older models or are you dead in the water if your drive dies or what not?

What I would probably do is use them in a rotation and then keep the yearly ones indefinitely. They have limited cycles so arn't really meant to be cycled over and over, and more for archiving, which is one thing I do lack myself in terms of backups. They are decently reliable considering the industry still uses them.

 

[Oyeve]

Curious has anyone looked into LTO tapes, is it viable? The older drives/tapes seem cheaper, but are you locked into a specific manufacturer and do they still make tapes for older models or are you dead in the water if your drive dies or what not?

What I would probably do is use them in a rotation and then keep the yearly ones indefinitely. They have limited cycles so arn't really meant to be cycled over and over, and more for archiving, which is one thing I do lack myself in terms of backups. They are decently reliable considering the industry still uses them.

Restoring from tape is a pita.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Restoring from tape is a pita.

Yeah I wonder how well Linux handles that and if it has any decent programs. I've done it in a Windows environment with Backupexec and it's not too bad though.

In my case tape would be more for archiving or as last resort.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Curious has anyone looked into LTO tapes, is it viable? The older drives/tapes seem cheaper, but are you locked into a specific manufacturer and do they still make tapes for older models or are you dead in the water if your drive dies or what not?

What I would probably do is use them in a rotation and then keep the yearly ones indefinitely. They have limited cycles so arn't really meant to be cycled over and over, and more for archiving, which is one thing I do lack myself in terms of backups. They are decently reliable considering the industry still uses them.

Tapes are reliable. Tape drives suck. If you keep an Auto-loader in daily rotation, it's going to fail, and suddenly all your cost savings start disappearing as you're buying new arms, new drives, new belts, and who knows what else. You can get rid of a ton of the complexity by just using a single Tape Drive, but even they'll still fail with surprising regularity, not to mention, for me anyways, a decent amount of storage in Tape form wouldn't cost much less (if not more) than a hard drive. If you really don't need the transportable factor, tapes aren't really worth it, especially not for home users.

My employer had a couple of multi-petabyte IBM Tape Systems for a long time for Datacenters + Replication, but we eventually moved to EMC Avamar / Data Domain + Replication. Even with the gross costs of EMC, it was still cheaper than maintaining those Tape Libraries.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Damn did not figure the drives were that unreliable. Then again in my couple years of dealing with them as a server tech I did have a few break down, which is a few too many when you're dealing with something that's suppose to be commercial grade.

 

[Oyeve]

At my job I manage 3 sites and each site has 8tb of raid 5 nas devices, all ssd, and I use acronis for grandfather, father, son backups. And each site replicatesto each other so if 2 sites go down I always have full backups of each site. The initial cost is high but restores are extremely fast.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Damn did not figure the drives were that unreliable. Then again in my couple years of dealing with them as a server tech I did have a few break down, which is a few too many when you're dealing with something that's suppose to be commercial grade.

tape, IMO, is not viable for home stuff. as coolness points out, drives are used heavily, need regular cleaning cycles, firmware updates, operated in strict environment conditions.

tape media can be problematic as well. sometimes you get bad tapes after usage, sometimes the tapes come defective in different ways, i.e. the media itself can smear on the r/w head and even cleaning wont help. and again, environmental conditions are strict if you want reliability and longevity.

stick with disks and raid+backup, youll be happier.

 

[JerYnkFan]

I back up my main SSD weekly to an image on HDD. Files are on cloud backup


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[cbn]

bump

 

[Spartak]

I backup all my files to an external HDD about 3x a year. My most frequent used files I keep in my Dropbox.

To me that's the best mix of affordability and security. The external HDD I keep disconnected in case of a ransomware attack.

 

[dondon44]

Storing backups online is the best method of protecting our personal information.

This is supposed to be a joke, right? You are missing the [irony] tag

 

[thecoolnessrune]

This is supposed to be a joke, right? You are missing the [irony] tag

You might think it's a joke, but once you remove "mah feels" from it, it is statistically the safest place to put your personal information when it comes to backup. Media rots, and the average human in general sucks at maintaining a proper backup regiment that audits, implements, and tests local backups. They don't want to have to worry about it. This doesn't even get into the statistics behind local data being lost to disasters such as major accidents, fire, flood, etc. For the average home user who just wants to keep a copy of the data important to them, like old photos, videos, and documents, online backup is easily not only the most convenient, but also the safest.

Data that is vulnerable to being abused or is otherwise sensitive should be treated as such. Almost every backup hack in existence through major cloud providers has occurred due to poor security measures by the end user. As far as I'm aware, none of the major cloud backup companies have had such an incident (yet). Carbonite has a situation a couple of years ago where they noticed a bunch of failed authorization attempts to accounts due to information hacks from other sites. In other words, if you practiced proper security measures (and used a different password for your important backups), you would have had nothing to worry about. I tell people often who come to me asking about what to do for backups, and if you're an end user, I'm always going to recommend Online backups through a major Cloud Backup Provider. When it comes to versioning (recovering from mistakes), convenience (easy enough for end users to use so they don't neglect proper regiment), and locality (if a backup doesn't exist in 3 places, it's not important data), online cloud backups is about the only singular way that with good judgement can tick all 3 boxes.

My grandparents have a Cloud Backup for their backups, but since they only have a 1.5Mbps DSL connection, they also have a local backup set to a Raspberry Pi. The Pi takes care of most of their restore needs, but the Cloud Backup is *always* the most important thing from them, because it's the best way to ensure their important memories remain safe from the forces of nature and their own increasing forgetfulness.

 

[dondon44]

it is statistically the safest place to put your personal information when it comes to backup.

Ok, I can agree with you ONLY conditionally, and the condition is that the user has to take complete control of the security (and, therefore, privacy). In other words, the online backup has to be encrypted by the end-user, not by the backup servers.

Then it all becomes less about hardware failure, more about user storing the passwords safely. Yeah, that is still a problem: if user leaks the password (example: Spectre), then the backup service can read ALL his most important and private data.

But in case of WW3, for example, the argument would definitively switch back to classic backup.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I guess the good thing about online backup is that it's also fully replicated to NSA servers at different locations, so it's going to be a really good backup.

 

[dondon44]

Yeah, I must contact the NSA, because I lost my last year's diary, and I would like them to help me recreate it. They're still backing up my last year's vacation videos, right?

 

[thecoolnessrune]

I guess the good thing about online backup is that it's also fully replicated to NSA servers at different locations, so it's going to be a really good backup.

That's definitely something to put on the cons list. It's obviously not desirable, but everyone will rate that con differently. "What's the chance the NSA is going to use the vacation videos I took to put me in jail?" vs. "What's the chance the that my backups will be swept away in a flood, burned up in a fire, or rotted out by high humidity, mold, or even an unfortunate electrostatic discharge?" I know what's statistically more likely to happen, but I couldn't tell you what people would decide based on that. Humans as a whole are scientifically proven to be comically bad at judging risk.