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

[cbn]

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

 

[ch33zw1z]

1x2TB main storage

1x2TB 3.5" backup

1x2TB 2.5" usb backup

create synchronicity for a left to right mirror

 

[corkyg]

Duplicate drives in mobile rack.

 

[rchunter]

42u APC netshelter rack with dual 50TB 4u servers running. I have a synology nas also but lately i've mostly just used it for streaming audio with minimserver.

 

[ch33zw1z]

^^ lol, what aee you running for 50TB servers

are they primary/secondary or replicated in anyway?

whats the monthly electric bill like?

 

[rchunter]

^^ lol, what aee you running for 50TB servers

are they primary/secondary or replicated in anyway?

whats the monthly electric bill like?

They are low power haswell e3 xeons. I keep one off a lot of the time. Yes replicated. 3500sq ft home, 150 bucks a month electric bill.

 

[NAC]

Just upgraded to 5 hard drives in my machine and one external USB. 4 of them are for primary storage, totaling 9tb. Currently they are a bit over half full. The last internal drive, and the USB, also total 9tb for backup which is done nightly. I then have another 2 8tb backup backup drives to store away from my house, and my goal is to update them about every 6 months.

 

[JoseRichardson]

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

 

[mikeymikec]

OP's question is not about which method of backup but which type of backup device(s) do you use.

 

[Charlie98]

I have 2x 3TB drives in the PC itself, and I rotate 2 different 2TB portable drives. I've lost an SSD once and the only thing that saved me was my backup on the D drive, so I've sort of become a backup fanatic.

 

[nOOky]

Two internal hdd's to backup with daily. One external drive to back the whole thing up maybe monthly. My PC has 4 drives in it, the OS SSD which is only for the OS, a dedicated STEAM SSD with my library on it, and two spinning disks that back those up so I have a spare in case one dies. If I lose all those to a power surge or something I'll hope the USB external drive doesn't fail at exactly the same time.

I have nothing personal backed up online.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Crashplan for Cloud (still got to migrate off that), Windows Backup to a ZFS SAN in the back of the house as well, so local + Cloud

 

[Yakk]

NAS + Crypto-Cloud solution.

 

[dlerious]

Blu-ray M-Disk, external drives.

 

[cbn]

Results so far:

1. Cloud
   3 vote(s)
   17.6%
2. NAS
   7 vote(s)
   41.2%
3. Another Windows PC in your network
   3 vote(s)
   17.6%
4. Multi-drive DAS
   2 vote(s)
   11.8%
5. USB (or eSATA) external hard drive
   11 vote(s)
   64.7%
6. USB external SSD
   1 vote(s)
   5.9%
7. USB Flash drive
   0 vote(s)
   0.0%
8. 5.25" Tape
   0 vote(s)
   0.0%
9. 5.25" Blu-ray
   2 vote(s)
   11.8%
10. 5.25" DVD
    2 vote(s)
    11.8%

A bit surprised to see Cloud only have 3 votes. (only one more vote than 5.25" Blu-ray)

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I'm getting winded by old age and too much change. Had the household all set up with a WHS-2011 box -- soon to be converted to Win 2012 R2 Essentials. Home server is still backing up Windows 7 systems (three of them) nightly without a hitch. But I couldn't get WHS'11 to back up a Win 10 system.

So I back up the Win 10 system locally with Macrium Reflect [Workstation license] -- to a hot-swap 2.5" drive with Full, Differential and Incremental backups on managed drive space. To be more specific, this is a dual-boot Win7/Win10 system, with the backup running from Win 10. There are five volumes on three drives with two boot-system volumes on one drive. Macrium handles it all very well.

And WHS'11 handles all the Win 7 systems very well, . . . . . too . . . .

 

[Red Squirrel]

All my data is on my file server, which I guess would count as a NAS. I have nightly jobs that backup data to a different LUN. Everything is raided.

I then have another offsite job that backs up to my web server. Then a manual job that backs up to individual drives that I plug into a dock. Everything is done using rsync.

I eventually want to look at a better setup where I can have better versioning/retention, but for the more important stuff I just use month/day folders or various combinations.

Typically each server backs up to it's own backup folder, and will have it's own job for that. Then a master job on the NAS will connect to each server to pickup that data. Since I use raid I'm less worried about disk failures and the backups are more there in case of my accidentally deleting something, or if the raid itself fails. MD raid is quite resilient though so never had that happen. Had close calls due to various system issues, but was always able to recover.

I've considered also getting cheap cloud storage as extra backup but I just don't like the idea of my data being on a server I don't control. But might look into that at some point, I could have a job that encrypts the data and preps it, then moves it to the cloud service. I'd also need a cloud service that supports rsync... most require some proprietary client.

 

[snoopy7548]

I voted eSATA or USB external HD, but it's actually bare drives I use with a docking station. 2x8TB for offline backups of my media/games/documents, may have to add a third soon.

 

[lenjack]

Imaging on an external hard drive, weekly, with 2 free programs. Both tested...both work.

 

[dlerious]

I considered the cloud, but had a couple of concerns. Data caps and bandwidth being the main ones. Things don't look like they're going to get much better with the way the FCC is going,

 

[beatle]

Backup desktop and HTPC images to NAS with Acronis. NAS is an R510 with a mix of drives pooled together with Drivepool and protected with SnapRAID. I also run a backup of the whole NAS to an external drive maybe once a month that stays in a fire safe when not in use.

 

[mindless1]

Fileserver with offline USB3 HDD backups of it, smaller frequently changed data and important OS partition images on rotated/redundant bootable flash drives. I use FreeFileSync/RealTimeSync to do the flash drive backups, just shove it in and it does the job on the config file on each flash drive (not Windows' autorun based).

 

[Lil'John]

I use 'three' depending upon what I store.

I've got a 'partial' backup going on my file/media server(~50TB and ~20TB from raid 6)

From there, I've got a 'real' backup computer with 3.5" drives in 4TB+ that I can remove/store for slightly larger files. I'm transitioning to this from external USB drive(1TB) This would be music, photo and movies. Music and movies are backed up mainly for convenience... ultimately, I've got original media stored elsewhere.

From there, I've got thumb drives for smaller but important files like reg keys, program downloads, etc.

Personally, I don't trust cloud anything. I've heard too many horror stories of companies just closing up at midnight and/or going 'ransomware'. My moto is if it isn't something I physically control, I have no control over any issues.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Personally, I don't trust cloud anything. I've heard too many horror stories of companies just closing up at midnight and/or going 'ransomware'. My moto is if it isn't something I physically control, I have no control over any issues.

That's pretty much my view on cloud as well. I think cloud may have merit in some applications where you can diversify your stuff across something you control and then cloud, but putting everything in cloud just freaks me right out. Especially SAAS as even your documents are in their system and it's proprietary so not like you could move them to another service or your own machine. Yet lot of companies are doing it now. I just could not sleep at night knowing that I have zero control if something goes wrong.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Replicated 128TB servers (two sites ~1,000 miles apart)
Offline USB3 / eSATA HDDs.