How do you do backup your personal data?

[benali72]

How do you back up your personal data?

For years I would have 2 hard disks on any PC I used, and I would copy folders I was changing data in from one disk to the other at the end of my session.  I would also back up folders with changes to my USB pen drive, which I used to carry updated files across the several computers I use.

On occasion I would make a partition-to-partition backup of my OS partition across disks.  (In Linux simply --  cp -av /mnt/primary/* /mnt/backup_partition/)

But now... wow, there are so many other ways to do things. Disks are so cheap you could set up RAID/mirroring across drives. Or you could do Snapshots in systems that support it on the OS level or through the virtual machine service. Or you could use a portable USB-attached disk drive and carry it around with you plugging it any whichever PC you used and using the internal disk on those PCs as the local backup disk. Or you could use a USB pen drive. Or... what do you do?

What approach do you use to back up your personal data?


 

[The Gorn]

I use a portable external hard drive for the media and Acronis Backup and Recovery 10 for software (this is for Windows, of course.) The drive I use is a 2 TB Western Digital model that I bought at Costco for around $130 about a year ago. Acronis was about $80 which I bought online.

I really like Acronis. It has a "boot disk" concept where even if the OS is trashed, you can boot from their recovery CD that you burn for yourself, and then use it to restore your last backup. Plus a zillion options to create fine grained backups and to control the process.

What I do is create a new backup set  and do one full backup, then every couple of weeks I do an incremental backup to the set. After about 6 months I create a new full backup set. I have about 200 GB of "live"+legacy data that I haul around, and the first full backup usually takes about 3-4 hours. After that, incremental backups every couple weeks require about 20-40 minutes to complete.

[TRexx]

I run an incremental backup every night to an external USB drive.  I use a backup product called Retrospect that came with the drive.   

[I D Shukhov]

How do you back up your personal data?

For years I would have 2 hard disks on any PC I used, and I would copy folders I was changing data in from one disk to the other at the end of my session.  I would also back up folders with changes to my USB pen drive, which I used to carry updated files across the several computers I use.

On occasion I would make a partition-to-partition backup of my OS partition across disks.  (In Linux simply --  cp -av /mnt/primary/* /mnt/backup_partition/)

But now... wow, there are so many other ways to do things. Disks are so cheap you could set up RAID/mirroring across drives. Or you could do Snapshots in systems that support it on the OS level or through the virtual machine service. Or you could use a portable USB-attached disk drive and carry it around with you plugging it any whichever PC you used and using the internal disk on those PCs as the local backup disk. Or you could use a USB pen drive. Or... what do you do?

What approach do you use to back up your personal data?

Windows backup to an external hard drive.  I used to use Acronis, but stopped when I started using Windows 7.  Acronis is probably better, and it did save my a$$ one time.  I need to look for it and possibly get the Windows 7 version.  I've recently bought a 2 TB drive and am going to put it inside the box.

[The Gorn]

I tried Windows backup when I first installed Windows 7. The problem with it is that it's incredibly slow and it does not seem to have incremental options. So you are basically duping your entire hard drive every time you back up. That's untenable for regular use. That's the entire reason I use Acronis. It saves me a bucket of time.

[PhilFromNY]

I use the 2GB free Dropbox for active projects. Besides off-site backup it has the added benefit of letting me share files across operating systems. I also use it for accounting data. That may horrify some but I encrypt it and don't see it as that big a deal. Prior to Dropbox I would email important documents to my GMail account which has 7GB storage. I also have print copies of the really important stuff.

In addition to Dropbox I've been diligent in maintaining all important data and files in a particular directory tree. I copy that tree to two external drives that I alternate copies to. The external drives are old IDE drives that I access with a USB/IDE adapter. I don't worry about backing up the OS, programs, or large third party datasets  (including music) because I can reproduce them fairly easily. Yes it would take time but I have another machine available that has the OS and software I need on it and Dropbox replicates the current stuff automatically. I used to use thumb drives but I found them to be too slow.

Old projects are on CD's that I have two copies of and the original customer has a copy as well. I purge old customer datasets so I'm basically backing up code and documents. Yes the CD's will degrade over time but so does the value of the project.