computer backups?

[scrabbler1]

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.

 

[Cat-tirement]

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.

 

[HI Bill]

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.

 

[DrRoy]

Something stored in only one place is not backed up. We use 2 external HDD's. WD 4T and a 6T.

 

[gtweath]

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.

 

[Katsmeow]

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.

 

[mpeirce]

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.

 

[corn18]

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.

 

[easysurfer]

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.

 

[Cessna152]

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.

 

[albireo13]

ordered a 1TB Glyph EHD. I have a MAC with 500GB SSD so, should be good.

 

[Rantey]

I keep my documents on Google Drive.

Google Drive is good device to backup for computer.

 

[Midpack]

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.

 

[Richard4444]

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 !

Rich

 

[Midpack]

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.

 

[BeachOrCity]

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?

Recommendations for reliable HD backup system?



Thx

The way you have been doing it is the best way. External hard drive using time machine. This protects against most everything that can happen.

To protect against theft and fire you can set iCloud as well.

Then you are all set.

 

[Senator]

I back up my data to the Google Cloud. It's $99 a year, for 2TB. I actually use less than 100 GB.

I have a nightly batch file that copies my data drive to my Google Drive. Then "Back up and Sync" does the work.

I have access to all my files when I am traveling. All pictures, tenant leases, quicken files, etc.

 

[DrRoy]

If it’s on your primary HD and a backup HD then that is 2 places.

 

[Kwirk]

I use Office 365. A $100/yr home account allows 6 users, each with 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage. (You can use alternative email addresses to be more than one user.) I don't make much use of the Office apps but my adult kids do.

I can't say this is the best deal around but we've been happy with it.

 

[kcowan]

I use a WD USB Drive and backup once a week. I use WD Smartware to create and update a total system image. I like its incremental update approach compressing the files. I also like using AEMEI Backerupper Freeware for an image file. Selectively I use the clouds for access to some files when away.

I use Win7 on a vintage HP laptop from 2010 (17" with no keypad keyboard).

 

[Cat-tirement]

I can’t imagine losing my primary HD and my external HD at the same time.

I can easily imagine it as I have lived it. Internal HD was failing, went to backup drive to recover, discovered it had corruption. Fortunately, I had multiple rotating backups so I went to the next one.

If your external isn't at an offsite location, you could also lose both in a fire or other disaster.

 

[mountainsoft]

I can easily imagine it as I have lived it. Internal HD was failing, went to backup drive to recover, discovered it had corruption. Fortunately, I had multiple rotating backups so I went to the next one.

Yep, same here. Unfortunately, more than once.

Back before external hard drives were widely available I used to backup to DVD discs. My hard drive failed and I discovered half of the DVD's were unreadable (they frequently degrade over time).

Early hard drives were a lot less reliable too. My first external backup drive was also corrupted when I needed to restore files from it.

So now I always have at least two backups, and burn sensitive files to Blu-Ray discs as another layer of protection.

 

[scrabbler1]

I can easily imagine it as I have lived it. Internal HD was failing, went to backup drive to recover, discovered it had corruption. Fortunately, I had multiple rotating backups so I went to the next one.

If your external isn't at an offsite location, you could also lose both in a fire or other disaster.

While I never had an entire failure of back-up files, I have had some scattered failures to recall files over the years. In one case, I was able to get a file from a back-up CD whose current version I could not call up. I hadn't made many, if any changes to the file in the interim. In another case, I had some Excel spreadsheets I could not call up after I had reloaded Excel onto a new PC. I brought the thumb drive to my ladyfriend's PC and was able to recall and (re-)save the files only to discover that not all of them were now able to be recalled on my new PC. I then went to my local library's PC and did the same thing for the remaining files. Those became accessible after I returned home, too. Never figured out why that happened.

 

[jim584672]

Always make sure you have tested the restore process. Nothing worse than finding out your backups are not recoverable. Also consider two backup solutions. For example I use Clonezilla, but I also periodically backup my documents by zipping/encrypting them and saving them to a drive apart from Clonezilla.

 

[easysurfer]

My go to imaging/cloning program is Macrium Reflect. With that, I don't recall a time when a backup was not recoverable. During the imagining, there's an option to verify the image which I do each time to be sure.