computer backups?

[Jerry1]

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

I can. A fire and a break in (theft) come to mind. Gotta get something off site. Like you, our pictures are in the cloud. That's a big one. It's a lot of volume (about 3/4's of a TB) and it would be very painful to DW if it was lost. I came close once but she didn't lose any pictures, just the organizing work she did. Now we're even more judicious about our back ups. Nothing fancy, just three rotating external HD's that I clone every time she does any work on he pictures.

 

[Cat-tirement]

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.

I went through a DVD phase too, using mostly a brand that was tested for higher quality (and higher price). Don't recall any failures of those, but did have some failures of cheap DVDs used for non-backup purposes. Also did 4mm tape for a while. Never did Blu-Ray, went direct to HDs.

 

[mountainsoft]

I went through a DVD phase too, using mostly a brand that was tested for higher quality (and higher price). Don't recall any failures of those, but did have some failures of cheap DVDs used for non-backup purposes. Also did 4mm tape for a while. Never did Blu-Ray, went direct to HDs.

DVD's tend to degrade from the outer edges inward. Most of the time you probably wouldn't notice as the data on the DVD writes from the inside and doesn't go all the way to the outer edge.

I don't recall which backup software I was using back then, but it was designed to fully maximize the space on the DVD, filling the DVD all the way out to the outer edge. So my odds of running into degradation were much higher. I tried restoring data from a dozen or so DVD's about a year later and at least a fourth of them were unreadable. I always used high quality brands, though maybe not top of the line.

I backed up to tape for a while too. I don't remember what size/type it was now. Also backed up to "Zip" drives for a while, and to floppy discs back in the day.

I use hard drives for backups now, but still burn sensitive data to BluRay discs every now and then as an extra layer of protection. Data on hard drives can change, but data burned to a BluRay is permanent (assuming the disc is readable).

 

[ExFlyBoy5]

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.

How do you accomplish this? I like the idea of automating my backups, but not sure what is a good/safe/secure method to do this with minimal risks of a program sending copies of my stuff to God only knows where.

Currently, I save work to a folder on my desktop and then copy it to Google drive one a week or so.

Edit: Well, as expected there is a pretty simple solution already available though Google drive and it took me about 3 minutes to set it up!

 

[easysurfer]

I had a chance to restore from a backup image the other day.

I bought a Cannon Laser printer about two weeks ago but the driver install, uninstall set up is so bad that installed a driver for the printer to use a wireless set up then (after the wireless install wasn't quite right) installing using a wired set up hosed things up so the printer wouldn't print and the drivers didn't uninstall. Some Amazon review on the printer complained about how their printer was unusable.

A backup image to the rescue. I restored my PC (I keep daily backups up to 30 days worth) to the day before I bought the printer, then reinstalled wired only and I'm happy (I really don't need the wireless setup).

 

[jim584672]

Thanks to this thread I set up a new additional backup method (Linux). I put a Veracrypt container on an external drive. Veracrypt is an encrypted container. Then run the rsync command to make the backup the same as the original. It only saves changes when run. I put the commands into an executable txt file and click on it after I do some work.

Example:
rsync -zavh --delete /home/jim/Documents /mnt/veracrypt1
rsync -zavh --delete /home/jim/Pictures /mnt/veracrypt1
rsync -zavh --delete /home/jim/Music /mnt/veracrypt1