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Old 07-26-2019, 04:06 PM   #21
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Originally Posted by mpeirce View Post
Using TimeMachine with an inexpensive external hard drive is pretty much a no-brainer for Mac users. It works well, is unobtrusive, and is integrated into the OS very well.

One other solution that works a bit differently is SuperDuper. It's terrific for creating an exact duplicate of your hard disk.
Carbon Copy Cloner and ChronoSync are two others I have great confidence in.
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Old 07-26-2019, 04:31 PM   #22
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Originally Posted by mpeirce View Post
Using TimeMachine with an inexpensive external hard drive is pretty much a no-brainer for Mac users...

Yep. Works for me.
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Old 07-26-2019, 05:07 PM   #23
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Well, my backup HD just died so I am now it's time to assess my backups approach before I just run out and buy a replacement.
We have an Apple Mac for our home PC, 1TB drive. It holds a bunch of personal info, financial and otherwise.
I had been running with an external Western Digital HD and Apple Time Machine, using the Firewire port on the MAC.
What do other folks use?
You need redundancy. A single backup is nice, but you don't want to discover your backup is unreadable when your main drive fails.

I'm not familiar with the Mac, but on the Windows side I use Macrium Reflect to perform a full image backup every Saturday, with differential image backups every other night of the week.

About once a month I swap that backup drive with a second backup drive I keep in my safe deposit box. This helps protect against fire, theft, floods, tornadoes, etc. that would take out the computer AND backup drive.

I also burn some of my more sensitive personal data (photos, financial documents, etc.) to Blu-Ray discs about once a year, just for another layer of protection.

Personally, I've never needed versioned backups. If I screw something up, I usually notice the same day and can restore a file from my backup drive. I can't think of a single instance where I've needed a version of file from a week ago, or that sort of thing. Maybe it's just me. The only exception might be program source codes, but I save each version individually on my hard drive anyway (which gets backed up).

I also prefer a full image backup over individual file backups. That way I can get my system up and running again quickly without having to reinstall the operating system, all my apps, and re configuring all my personal settings. I also don't have to worry that a file I need was not included in the backup set.

Cloud backups are too slow for the amount of data I generate and cost too much. I also don't want to have to reinstall Windows and the backup app before I can restore my files.
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Old 07-26-2019, 05:30 PM   #24
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As a long time sys admin, I don't store anything private on the cloud, ever. On the other hand, I'm no longer enthused about spending my spare time working on computers at home either, and since I travel a lot and don't want to carry more than a mid-size laptop, RAID/NAS/etc are inconvenient. My favorite cheap & easy solution is keep my old external hard drives (1 TB and above), encrypt them and backup my files to them. One's in storage, one's in my closet somewhere, and one travels with me. If the current laptop dies, I'll download my software again, pull the licenses off my hard drive and reload them along with my files. I just travel with laptop, 2TB external drive and a couple of thumb drives; one loaded as a USB bootable recovery drive.
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Old 07-26-2019, 05:41 PM   #25
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I use two 2TB usb drives on my Macbook Pro Laptop.
First drive uses Time Machine weekly and the 2nd drive uses Time Machine monthly to backup.
I have programmed reminders set to tell me when it's time to run them.
It takes 5-10 minutes to run the backups.
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Old 07-26-2019, 07:14 PM   #26
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I do backups every month of my personal files onto thumb drives, alternating between 2 different thumb drives. I save only the files which I have changed during the month. But every 3 months I do a complete back-up of all personal files into a different directory on the thumb drive. This gives me some redundancy.


When I had a hard drive failure back in 2016, it was a minor nuisance restoring all the latest versions of the files because for some I had multiple versions of them and had to make sure I chose the most recent one. I had also figured out how to use the repair facility on my W10 thumb drive so I could access those files on the failing HD I had changed since the start of the month even though I could not fully boot up the PC. I did lose a few emails but nothing terrible, and I did get all of my personal files restored, latest versions, with no other losses.


There are times I have done a recently-changed files back-up in the middle of the month if I suspected some unusual behavior on my PC. This was particularly true back in 2003 when I was working from home and could not afford to lose any recently saved work. Then, I did daily backups of recently changed files onto diskettes.
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Old 07-26-2019, 07:27 PM   #27
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How about reliability? Is any external HD more reliable than other?
I think I will go with another external HDD ... perhaps 2, for redundancy.
Drives from all manufacturers fail. I usually buy ones that have more than the basic 1 year warranty. It doesn't help you when a drive fails, but I figure the company feels it's a better product if they give it a longer warranty. I keep in my collection an assortment of drives from Seagate, Western Digital, HSGT (now owned by WD), and Toshiba. That way if a company is having a bad batch of products, I also have backups on others that aren't having the same problem.
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Old 07-26-2019, 07:30 PM   #28
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How about reliability? Is any external HD more reliable than other?
I think I will go with another external HDD ... perhaps 2, for redundancy.
SSDs are more reliable than HDDs as they have no moving parts. You can get a 1TB SanDisk Extreme external SSD for $160, or a 2TB version from Samsung (T5) for $330. If you don't have more than 2TB of data, I personally think the SSDs are worth the extra cost.
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Old 07-27-2019, 04:30 AM   #29
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Something stored in only one place is not backed up. We use 2 external HDD's. WD 4T and a 6T.
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Old 07-27-2019, 06:48 AM   #30
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My biggest fear/concern is losing photos and other sentimental documents. Everything is auto backed up to google drive, I do a weekly time machine (mac) backup to one external HD, and a monthly backup of just the data to another external HD that I keep in a more secure location. 4 copies (computer, cloud, 2 external HD) may be redundant but I would be devastated to lose these files.
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Old 07-27-2019, 11:04 AM   #31
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I have an external Passport drive that I periodically copy all of my data to. I don't backup programs and the OS since I figure that if something happens I will just take the opportunity to do a new install.

Most documents I save (or scan) as a PDF and upload to Evernote and make them searchable. I don't upload super sensitive financial documents and keep those locally and on the Passport drive.

For pictures and some documents that I want an extra copy of, I copy those to my OneDrive that I get with my MS office subscription.
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Old 07-27-2019, 11:14 AM   #32
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Originally Posted by gtweath View Post
My biggest fear/concern is losing photos and other sentimental documents.
Honestly, I used to care a lot about backups with multiple offsite redundancies.

At this point, I care about the photos and that's about it. And the photos are in iCloud (darn safe) and also reside on mutiple devices and also are backed-up.

The rest, not really that important.
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Old 07-27-2019, 12:27 PM   #33
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For simplicity, a new external HDD and Time Machine works. I will add to the redundancy recommendation as a fire may take out all your data. I have an iMac and use the following:

1. Main data is stored on an external (Thunderbolt) RAID 0+1 array (4 discs). This mitigates drive failure risk.
2. External Thunderbolt HDD that holds a Time Machine backup
3. External Thunderbolt HDD that holds a clone of main drive and data drive (chronosync)
4. All data (except images and movies which are 3 TB) are stored on OneDrive
5. Once a month I do a clone of the data drive to an external USB drive and keep it in the safe in my house
6. Twice a year I do a clone of the data drive to an external USB drive and mail it to my MIL

May be overkill, but I lost everything in 1996 due to lack of redundancy. Luckily we didn't have a lot to lose back then.
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Old 07-28-2019, 08:31 AM   #34
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Isn't there an old saying that goes something like when comes to backing up there are two types of people?

Those who don't back up and those who back up after losing stuff in the past.
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Old 07-28-2019, 11:54 AM   #35
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Hardware-wise, I bought an ioSafe NAS machine (fireproof and waterproof) back when wife and I were working from home, had a lot of data to keep backed up, was too sensitive to be placed in the cloud (even encrypted,) and could justify it as a business expense.

It had really been handy for nightly back ups of Linux, Windows, and iOS machines we had while working. Different backup software used for each OS - generally all of them made periodic images followed by deltas.

After retiring and we moved to a rental home a few months ago I couldn’t run cables around the house, so getting a complete snapshot image of, say, 400GB over WiFi to the central NAT at 100 Mbps would be over 10 hours (versus ~1 hour over CAT 5 or 6 cable at 1 Gbps.) I made that mistake only once on a Windows 7 machine.
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Old 07-28-2019, 07:51 PM   #36
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ordered a 1TB Glyph EHD. I have a MAC with 500GB SSD so, should be good.
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Old 07-29-2019, 04:12 AM   #37
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I keep my documents on Google Drive.
Google Drive is good device to backup for computer.
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Old 07-29-2019, 04:57 AM   #38
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Something stored in only one place is not backed up.
How’s that? I can’t imagine losing my primary HD and my external HD at the same time. All our photos, emails, contacts are on iPads also. I’ve replaced external HD’s proactively and I’ve never lost anything in the 39 years I’ve used PCs daily.
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Old 07-29-2019, 05:04 AM   #39
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My IT person set up my computer with a cloud backup called 'iBackup,' nothing to do with Apple. Five years ago after a probable cable surge my HD fried. I bought a new computer and restored everything (actually, he did as I watched) and everything appeared magically just as I last saw the previous one. I still use iBackup !

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Old 07-29-2019, 05:07 AM   #40
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I wish I trusted the cloud, and it wasn’t so costly for 1TB. I am sure it’s the most reliable approach to preserve data.

I don’t fully trust the cloud from a privacy standpoint - data mining, hacking, ID theft. Every online data source says they’re bulletproof - until they’re not...

I back up continuously to an external WD HD just using the stock Win 10 backup utility. If I somehow lost my primary and external HD at the same time (can’t imagine how), financial institutions have all our info and much of our other stuff is also in our iPads and iPhones. So we could recover even though it would be a PITA.
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