What is your Backup Strategy?

How do you backup?

  • Local or External Disk/Disk Array

    Votes: 46 61.3%
  • NAS

    Votes: 23 30.7%
  • Cloud (S3, BackBlaze, SkyDrive)

    Votes: 23 30.7%
  • Tape, since the 80's.

    Votes: 7 9.3%
  • One RAID or ZFS volume for everything is all you need man!

    Votes: 12 16.0%
  • I don't backup anything...

    Votes: 5 6.7%
  • CD/DVD

    Votes: 5 6.7%
  • Flash Drive

    Votes: 2 2.7%

  • Total voters
    75

l3thal6

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 26, 2011
Messages
322
As the title implies this thread is about what you use to keep your data safe. So what do you use to keep your data safe?

Personally, I write a system image to an external drive weekly and I backup all of my documents, pictures, music, etc. constantly with BackBlaze. I still have about 1TB of unimportant media that I don't backup regularly and I hope to be migrating all of that to the NAS that I plan to build in the next few months.
 
Anything that is hard or impossible to replace get's backed up via crashplan (real time backups) to my local nas (zfs based) as well as to backblaze. Anything that is fairly easily replaced lives on a raidz2 server colocated in a high-end datacenter with redundant power.
 
I have my main user docs and what not synced across systems. Then I have a bunch of SSDs with various installations cloned on them. So at any time I can just throw another drive in with a recent install, then latest user docs get synced.

But sure, I have backups to external storage too.
 
6TB in a raidz pool, rsync'd every night to another 6TB raidz pool. Files of massive importance (financial, serials, and irreplaceable photos) are also copied to a USB drive, and some are uploaded to gmail, with an older copy on a dvd at my parent's place a couple hours away.
 
how long did it take you to upload that 20T to crashplan? in the even of a catastrophe how long would it take for you to re-download all that data?
 
At work 40TB on 120 LTO2 tapes + 100 DLT tapes. At home a few hundred GB on 2 hard drives that alternate backups. Both using bacula as the backup software in gentoo linux.

That had to have taken months..

To years. Although don't they ship you a drive for several hundred dollars that you ship back and they add that to your backup pool like other cloud backups.
 
how long did it take you to upload that 20T to crashplan? in the even of a catastrophe how long would it take for you to re-download all that data?

A few months. I'm not really worried about the re-download time. CrashPlan doesn't delete your content after 30 days like most cloud backup providers. The data I consider critical is only about 200 gigs, the rest can take a while and I wouldn't really care.
 
A few months. I'm not really worried about the re-download time. CrashPlan doesn't delete your content after 30 days like most cloud backup providers. The data I consider critical is only about 200 gigs, the rest can take a while and I wouldn't really care.

Same here, I've got about 200gb of important data, photos, finances and my phd research on crashplan.
 
I have a MediaSonic 2-bay external eSATA enclosure with 3TB total in it, which I use SyncToy to sync all my documents, media etc. every 2 weeks. I also take an image of my system partition every 2 weeks. The enclosure is only powered on for back-ups.

Contemplating using Dropbox for vital stuff (documents) and automating my back-up procedure and making it weekly.
 
Backup & docs stored on a local ZFS box (Solaris) + crashplan family plan for all my computers + solaris servers (9TB) - took about 3-4 months to upload everything.

I <3 crashplan.
 
I backup my VM's to disk using Veeam and use an Ultrium 3 LTO drive nightly as well for data, Exchange etc.
 
At work:

Primary backup is handled by a dedicated BackupPC server. The system is running FreeBSD 8.2, OS and data on ZFS. zfSnap takes regular snapshots of everything, then we use zxfer to copy the data to a zpool in an external eSATA enclosure, which is rotated offsite on Friday. The external zpools are built on top of geli devices; accessing the data without the right passphrase would be difficult, or so we hope. Also, we use ZFS compression instead of BackupPC's, so it's possible to restore files without BackupPC (in case the backup server craters). The server boots from a 4-way mirror of external laptop drives; we take a performance hit for that, but it allows us to dedicate all the internal drives for data, and have plenty of fault tolerance.

Special backups (e.g. databases) are handled on each server using supplied tools; the backup files are stored by date in local directories, then picked up by the BackupPC server.

We do have a couple of older hosts that still use tape; they'll be phased out in the next few years.
 
Everything backed up to server. Important pictures and documents backed up to an external and Amazon cloud drive. I have about 30 gigs of old family photos backed up to DVD that I reburn every 5 years and keep in a firebox.

I'm thinking of switching cloud storage because cloud drive can be a pita. Any suggestions, need 50-100gb. I just know that Amazon servers are extremely reliable.
 
Everything backed up to server. Important pictures and documents backed up to an external and Amazon cloud drive. I have about 30 gigs of old family photos backed up to DVD that I reburn every 5 years and keep in a firebox.

I'm thinking of switching cloud storage because cloud drive can be a pita. Any suggestions, need 50-100gb. I just know that Amazon servers are extremely reliable.

CrashPlan is $5/month for all you can eat. For that size you could also look into Mozy. I had no issues with their service (until they changed the pricing that is).

Carbonite throttled uploads after you hit a certain size and the software sucked IMO.

BackBlaze is another option if you don't have files over 4gig (or was it 8?). Any files over their size limit won't be backed up.
 
For the last few years I've stored everything on the single 1TB drive in my PC (which is full) and kept very little backed-up.
Recently I got myself 4 new 1TB drives and was going to use all 4 in a RAIDZ pool on a new home server.
Then when various things went wrong on the initial server configuration and I read about the optimum number of drives for a ZFS array I decided to make the server array just 3x1TB RAIDZ and use the other drive as an external backup.
It's currently connected internally to my PC, formatted NTFS and with basically a copy-and-paste of my existing drive. I'm also copying things over to the new server and starting to split content in to shareable and personal, along with user spaces for the rest of the family.
Once I'm happy that it's all copied to the new drives I'll take the new drive out of the PC and store it elsewhere, and use the server to access the content day-to-day.
The original copy of the data on my existing drive will be trimmed down, and maybe compressed. It's still my OS drive and needs some free space for the system to breathe. I'm wondering how much longer it will live, so it's a good job I've taken the backups. When it dies I'll get an SSD instead :)
 
Got a ESXi 5.0 box running WHS2011 virtualized.


From there I run FlexRAID to cover my media, and use Crashplan to cover backups.
Ive paid for 4 years of Crashplan unlimited, so Crashplan does the following:
Backup everything to an USB3 2TB hd
Backup everything to a laptop with an external hd, placed at my parents house (synched every night)
Backed up to Crashplans servers.


I must say Im extremely satisfied with this setup. For quick recovery, I have the external USB3 drive.
In case of robbery/fire, I have the drive at my parents house.
If all else fails, I have Crashplans servers to rely on :)
 
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