Today is World Backup Day

Zarathustra[H]

Zarathustra[H]

Extremely [H]
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Our readers probably don't need to be told that backups are a good idea, but a reminder every now and then can't hurt, right? Today is apparently World Backup Day. Which begs the question, shouldn't every day be world backup day?

Personally my backup runs every 15 minutes off of my NAS to Crashplan. I run an encrypted file system so I never have to worry about the security implications of remote backups.

Losing your files is way more common than you’d think.
Ever lost your phone, camera or tablet? That counts. Your stuff could have been saved with a backup.
One small accident or failure could destroy all the important stuff you care about.
 
I just took my NAS out of Raid 1 yesterday because I needed the extra storage. Come at me data gods!
 
The backup plan my family uses for our irreplaceable personal photos, videos, and documents uses redundant remote external storage devices. We use the Synology DS416Play as our backup device. (https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS416play#spec) Each one has 4 4TB HDD’s in RAID 10 using BTRFS. Thus 8TB of storage space. Each family’s home has one, my sister, my parents, my wife’s parents, and my wife’s brother. Early Sunday morning each week, each family’s PC will automatically establish a VPN connect to me. I run the VPN service on my DD-WRT router. They then perform an incremental backup. Each family’s PC will backup its irreplaceable personal content to the four remote NAS’s.
So, complex and expensive, but the chances of all five NAS’s failing or being destroyed at the same time is practically impossible.
 
Best backup software IMO is Macrium Reflect FREE. You can use a registry hack to disable imaging of certain directories to save space. You can setup and schedule full or incremental backups, it comes with a free Windows PE or Linux based recovery boot software, and it's all completely free.

https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree
 
I've only ever had 1 drive fail on me in my lifetime. An old Seagate Barracuda. That was about 10 years ago and luckily it was only a firmware issue and not a bad platter. I am pretty confident in my data recovery abilities so probably one of the reasons I never use redundant backups aside from some taxes/employee related files which I keep hard copies as well as cloud backups. Our family doesn't really keep photos/videos so we never have a need to back those up. Most of the data I hoard goes towards my Plex server and all the BRs I rip.
 
I just started backing up my HDDs about a month ago but I really don't have much important data to worry about. I only run backups once a week.
 
I have a client that would never remember to run backups so I recommended backblaze. Now there is a reliable, inexpensive, offsite, secure backup. Problem solved.

this is not an advertisement, there are several other similarly priced services.
 
Currently have crappy comcast upload speeds. As soon as i get Nexlight (city run fiber w/ 1gig up/down) i'll backup everything; probably with backblaze. April 12th can't come soon enough! (when they're coming to finally connect me!)

My SSD and local-backup Raid1 HDDs just need to survive that long =P
 
given i just lost a completely full 4TB hard drive 2 days ago.. absolutely nothing, bought a new one and redownloaded everything i had on it because after all it's just information and can always be replaced. if it's something important i have it on paper filed away in a fire proof safe like any smart person would.. :p
 
My backup plan (such as it is) involves backing up my desktop computer, my laptop computer, my multimedia computer, and my mothers laptop to a FreeNAS box using True Image. That FreeNAS box cost me a pretty penny, as it has eight 5TB drives in a RAID-Z2 configuration. From that FreeNAS box, I backup to several external hard drives which I store in my desk at work.

As for my two USB drives that I keep on my keychain (one with some personal files, one with all of my utilities), those are backed up to my FreeNAS box usng FreeFileSync. My most critical file is my KeePass and my WinAuth file which contains my passwords and registration codes. Those get copied over to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon Drive, and OneDrive.
 
NickJames said:
I've only ever had 1 drive fail on me in my lifetime. An old Seagate Barracuda. That was about 10 years ago and luckily it was only a firmware issue and not a bad platter. I am pretty confident in my data recovery abilities so probably one of the reasons I never use redundant backups aside from some taxes/employee related files which I keep hard copies as well as cloud backups. Our family doesn't really keep photos/videos so we never have a need to back those up. Most of the data I hoard goes towards my Plex server and all the BRs I rip.
Click to expand...
Don't jinx yourself by saying how lucky you've been
 
NeghVar said:
Don't jinx yourself by saying how lucky you've been
Click to expand...

oh, now it will come for him, too late. then he will remember his post but it wont matter, because all will be already gone. a meteor will strike his house, probably.
 
Hmmm ... both World back up day and national crayon day? Question is, what colors to choose for the data.
 
NeghVar said:
Don't jinx yourself by saying how lucky you've been
Click to expand...

I've been using the same WD Caviar since 2007ish that've been running 24/7 aside from a few power outages (damn thing didn't even sit on a surge protector for the first 3 years). I would actually like to see it crash already as an excuse to replace it but it's still chugging a long at 90mb/s just fine. I am terrible at data management and honestly just have a huge mess of files such as screenshots and game mods dating back to 2000 when I got my first PC (that I could call mine). I still have old Counter-Strike server files I used to host, old Star Wars JK mods and copies of Tribes 2 with various mods sitting somewhere in the archives of my drives. Everytime I bought a new HDD I would transfer the contents of the old one to the new one. I still have Windows XP system files in my current 4TB drive lol.
 
it will be a small meteor, it will destroy only his files and spare all the living things, so they can forever suffer for the loss of his data.
 
Once a week I have each system in my household run an image to my WD NAS. I always keeps one previous image available.
I also have a file level backup for a data drive on my system that houses all the family pictures/videos/software to the same NAS.

The NAS gets copied to a couple SATA drives via a USB 3 docking station and stored in my desk at work. (just in case)
I use 2 drive because I rotate them so one is always away from the house.

If something takes out both my home and my office, I doubt I'll be around to worry about the loss of my data. :cry:


Now for work it's a bit different.
All the servers/data are synced throughout the day to my backup server.
Over the weekend the data on the backup server is copied to LTO-6 tapes (currently using 7 for a full backup of over 20 TB). Tapes are then taken off-site, with the past 2 weeks always off-site so I have at least 2 copies in a worse case disaster.
The few restores I've had to do over the past few years have almost always been from the backup servers drives. I think I've only had to go to tape twice in the past 4-5 years.
 
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everything that is important to me can fit on one thumb drive.

everything else is porn, which is replaceable
 
lcpiper said:
Neither are snapshots.
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Agreed. Every 15 minutes my system scans my important document folders for changes and uploads any changes to my encrypted file structure to offsite backup on Crashplan.

The same happens for less critical folders, but they are scanned much less frequently and given a slower priority.
 
Lots of backups...

Documents and pictures backup every hour or so from the desktop and laptops to the NAS. (RAID-5, but RAID isn't a backup)

NAS backs up EVERYTHING nightly to a pair of encrypted external USB HDDs. Critical stuff is duplicated on both drives, non-critical (movies, Steam game backups, etc) isn't duplicated.

NAS also backs up critical stuff (documents, family photos, irreplaceable downloaded YouTube videos, etc), to Amazon Glacier. Probably about 150ish total GB here.

That pretty much covers any kind of reasonable disaster I might encounter I think.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Agreed. Every 15 minutes my system scans my important document folders for changes and uploads any changes to my encrypted file structure to offsite backup on Crashplan.
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But they are not encrypted on their way there?
 
Meeho said:
But they are not encrypted on their way there?
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Crashplan DOES encrypt the data, but I don't trust that. A good rule of thumb is unless you are the one and only holder of an encryption key, to run the other way. With any system that allows you to just log in and immediately access you encrypted data, this means that the actual encryption key is stored somewhere on that service, and means that someone else can decrypt your data..

I run a reverse file system encryption in a VM, then share the newly encrypted file system with another VM on which the crashplan service runs. This way nothing crashplan has access to my raw unencrypted data.

Crashplan then encrypts it again, which is really a waste for me. I believe they use TripleDES which isn't very strong by modern standards.
 
I only did a 25GB backup so far today at work. Although at 8:30 PM a few automated backups will kick off.. As much as I like the robot in the archive, I hope not to be still here when that starts.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Crashplan DOES encrypt the data, but I don't trust that. A good rule of thumb is unless you are the one and only holder of an encryption key, to run the other way. With any system that allows you to just log in and immediately access you encrypted data, this means that the actual encryption key is stored somewhere on that service, and means that someone else can decrypt your data..

I run a reverse file system encryption in a VM, then share the newly encrypted file system with another VM on which the crashplan service runs. This way nothing crashplan has access to my raw unencrypted data.

Crashplan then encrypts it again, which is really a waste for me. I believe they use TripleDES which isn't very strong by modern standards.
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What's a reverse file system encryption? And do you end up with a single container or...?
 
drescherjm said:
I only did a 25GB backup so far today at work. Although at 8:30 PM a few automated backups will kick off.. As much as I like the robot in the archive, I hope not to be still here when that starts.
Click to expand...

What is this "robot in the archive"?
 
On topic, does anyone have any experience or recommendations on media safes? I store backups at home, but I should know better. It's made of wood!
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
What is this "robot in the archive"?
Click to expand...

It's a dual drive LTO2 autochanger with 24 slots (Exabyte Magnum 224). The robot manages moving the tapes from the slots to the drives and back. And yes it is a decade old. I asked a few years ago to replace it with an LTO6 drive however the budget was not there. I will have to revisit that later this year or next.
 
Meeho said:
What's a reverse file system encryption? And do you end up with a single container or...?
Click to expand...

I didn't feel like slowing down my disk access on my NAS by encrypting the entire disk, so I run it unencrypted locally.

There is an older (imperfect, with some weaknesses) file system based encryption in Linux called EncFS. It was originally intended to read/write an encrypted directory and mount it unenecrypted elsewhere for use unencrypting the data on demand as it is read once the key was presented. It also has a command line switch that allows it to reverse its behavior, this is what I use.

I point it at the unencrypted directory on my NAS, and give it a mountpoint. That mountpoint is then encrypted as it is read on demand. This is what is shared with my dedicated crashplan VM.

So the dedicated crashplan vm is only presented with encrypted data. It reads that data and uploads any changes.

When you look at the encrypted file structure (what Crashplan sees) it looks like this:

upload_2017-3-31_18-10-24.png
 
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Any suggestion for a cost effective way of backing up a home NAS 30-40TB of data?

I'd rather not spend on having to build another NAS just to keep a backup copy
 
Hornet said:
Any suggestion for a cost effective way of backing up a home NAS 30-40TB of data?

I'd rather not spend on having to build another NAS just to keep a backup copy
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Back up only the data that is less expensive to back up then to loose. You could also look to see if you can find a used tape drive on Ebay/ Craig's List. Tapes are cheap, new drives are not.
 
Hornet said:
Any suggestion for a cost effective way of backing up a home NAS 30-40TB of data?

I'd rather not spend on having to build another NAS just to keep a backup copy
Click to expand...
I forget the name, but same places have truly unlimited cloud backups, even for externals; the catch being it has to connect to the external drives within 30 days to verify that you're keeping the data locally, otherwise they'll delete. I'm drawing a blank on which places do that, but I know I've seen it before.
 
Since it's a Backup Day thread, I'll use it to ask for a backup related question.


I have 10 TB of data (audiovisuals, program installation setups, eBooks, documents etc.) that is growing slowly, but steadily.

I follow 3-2-1 strategy.

2nd and 3rd copies of my data are maintained using Syncovery left to right exact mirror option.

2nd copy is synced to local SATA drives that are unplugged after sync.

3rd copy is synced to SFTP server in off-site location.

I sync (backup) weekly. One week to 2nd copy, another week to 3rd copy for some kind of versioning.

As you see, I use syncing for the purpose of backing up. With this approach I maintain 2 nearly identical (differs in data that was changed over a couple of weeks) additional mirror copies of my main data, therefore I’d like to improve this approach by continuing using Syncovery left to right exact mirror option for maintaining only 2nd copy of my data, but using incremental archive backup software for maintaining my 3rd copy for a better versioning and a bigger archive.

With 3rd copy I’d like to be able to restore exact mirror state of my data that was present when that particular incremental backup was performed.

Syncovery has file versioning, but doesn’t have such ‘left to right exact mirror incremental archive backup’ feature, therefore I’m looking for software with ‘left to right exact mirror incremental archive backup’ capabilities.

One thing I like with Syncovery left to right exact mirror sync approach is that it gives me a peace of mind, because after syncing I can simply open the backup with a file explorer > right mouse click on my backed up folders > Properties > General tab and manually check if backed up file counts, folder counts and sizes in bytes are the same as in my main actively used data copy.

Using incremental archive backup makes things more complex and prone to corruption and errors, therefore I’d like such software to have an option to check the whole incremental backup archive chain for integrity and report last instance incremental backup file counts, folder counts and sizes in bytes, so I could check it with my main actively used data copy.

Basically, I’m looking for Windows software with these 3 features:

  1. Left to right (source to destination) exact mirror incremental archive backup

  2. FTP or SFTP as destination

  3. Integrity checks for the whole incremental backup chain with reports of backed up file counts, folder counts and sizes in bytes for the last instance of incremental backup, so I could check it with my main data copy and insure it matches.
Thanks for your input.
 
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