What is Your Computer Backup Routine? Anyone use BackBlaze, Drive1 or Arq?

[threeonesix]

Remember, file sync and RAID (1, 5, etc) in themselves are NOT effective backups!

Backing up the system drive in a way you can boot from a USB flash drive and restore from an image is recommended as well. I've actually had to use that type of restoration more than any data restoration (with versioning, not single instance).

Exactly, sync is not backup. Often a difficult thing to explain to non-techy folks.

If OP is actually looking for other potential solutions, I would introduce Veeam Free Edition. Free Backup Software For Windows, VMware, & More - Veeam Use it to create a machine image that is restorable from a USB thumb drive, back up data to an external hard drive for easy restores and then also send the same data to Backblaze for offsite cloud storage. I use Veeam on my personal PC's in this exact way. Works great, have never lost a file (knock on wood!!). It has saved me from several Quicken crashes. I don't know what it is with that software but every 5 years or so it tries to corrupt my files. I just restore them from backup rather than go through all of the nonsense Quicken wants you to do in order to recover files/data.

 

[Crewer]

I use Microsoft Onedrive but I manually copy files to it and don't let it automatically sync. I don't know what sync really does and how its different from backing up but in any case I want the control. My Iphone photos are on Icloud. I copy really important things - tax records, many photos, etc. to external HD.

I used to make external boot disks but that's when we had a business and more records were important.

 

[threeonesix]

I use Microsoft Onedrive but I manually copy files to it and don't let it automatically sync. I don't know what sync really does and how its different from backing up

"Sync" keeps files mirrored in two or more locations; any change you make to the file in Location 1 automatically makes the same changes to the same file in Location 2, 3, etc. So if you if have automated real-time sync enabled and you make a mistake to file.xlsx on your local computer, that same mistake is made to all of the sync'd file.xlsx in those locations. If there were two Earth's, Earth1 and Earth2, and you had your house on Earth1 synced to Earth2, the minute you painted your Earth1 house red, your house on Earth2 would be painted red simultaneously.

"Backup" is a point-in-time copy of a file that does not change when you make changes to the original file. We could get into the various types of backup (full, differential, incremental, etc.) but that's probably a bit much for this conversation. That is more important for enterprise-level backups rather than personal, private files.

 

[easysurfer]

I've been assimilated (as in SSD) and I like it!

The last couple days have been rough trying to get my PC back to working well again. I restored my PC from a Gnome Disks image from about 2 weeks ago. But that was running way too slow as in crawling. So, I ended up finally getting a SSD. But trying to clone to the SSD with two different programs didn't work.

I ended up restoring again my Gnome Disk image. This time directly to the SSD and now my systems seems to run quite spiffy. I haven' testing how fast it runs while the backup jobs are also running. Perhaps another time. I do have two scheduled backups to run tonight. First things first.

 

[teetee]

I set up a NAS on a N150 mini pc using openmediavault (OMV) and use scheduled Borg backup service via OMV's add-on to do data backup between the main storage (12TB) and the backup drive (12TB), both usb external drives.

Most of my data are on the NAS now. The same box also runs a number of dockerized services (nextcloud aio, jellyfin, trillium, frigate, photoprism, navidrome, timetracker, etc). it is not too much to say that my laptops and the desktop have been just thin clients in the past couple of years, with tailscale as VPN and the reverse proxy for accessing the files from outside of home network.

The Borg has saved me a couple of times and it is free.

 

[zaqxsw]

Small, simple, cheap, and has never let me down in a couple of decades. I do a full C:/ image every day on my desktop and laptop. It takes less than two minutes each. I also image whenever I'm try something new in case I don't like it.

I've successfully restored literally dozens of times with no issue. I just copy the .exe file on a bootable USB drive. Simple and proven!

Drive Snapshot

 

[thnsn]

I’ve been really happy using iDrive to back up our Macs. My PC is only used for design work, so my Synology NAS keeps my design files mirrored between my PC and my Mac. The Synology NAS is also used for my archive of scanned photos that are very large in size, but rarely used. Music library is there as well. This is backed up to a local drive as well as iDrive. Our Macs are also locally backed up to the NAS via Time Machine. It’s really time for a new NAS, as it’s 6 years old and has super slow Ethernet.

 

[KarenF]

I back my computer (chosen folders) to Google Drive.

 

[tpkinsl]

I spent my career in tech, but honestly don’t understand most of these solutions! So much for keeping up with things…

Anyway, for the non- techies in the crowd- I bought a 4TB external drive from Costco - smaller than a deck of cards. I asked ChatGTP to write a script to back up my c drive every Wednesday morning. I modified it to give me a message in a log when it ran. Took 10 minutes and other than the hard drive, is free.

 

[easysurfer]

I spent my career in tech, but honestly don’t understand most of these solutions! So much for keeping up with things…

Anyway, for the non- techies in the crowd- I bought a 4TB external drive from Costco - smaller than a deck of cards. I asked ChatGTP to write a script to back up my c drive every Wednesday morning. I modified it to give me a message in a log when it ran. Took 10 minutes and other than the hard drive, is free.

How about the restoring of the backup created by the script? How involved is that?

 

[tpkinsl]

Good question and honestly I don’t know! My routine simply copies all my documents to the back up drive. If I lost the drive or got a virus, I would rebuild windows and copy my data back

 

[easysurfer]

Good question and honestly I don’t know! My routine simply copies all my documents to the back up drive. If I lost the drive or got a virus, I would rebuild windows and copy my data back

I've switched over to Macrium Reflect to Hasleo Backup Suite to do automated scheduled incremental backups every night. But I've yet to actually test Hasleo on my machine. I should but have been a bit nervous to try. My plan is to make a couple of full images of my hard drive first (using Gnome Disk - which I know works), then test to Hasleo.

 

[surprising]

Installed TrueNAS (originally called FreeNAS) on an old i5-3470 box I had lying around. Filled it with 4 2TB drive RAID and it's been rock solid for years.

 

[ddk70]

I use. CARBONITE. Backups re seamless, incremental after first backup. Only recently didn’t have to use it when I was installing a new computer. I tried to do it all myself and then we went to a hiccup. This support system was great and helping me resolve my issues.

I pay for the subscription on a three-year basis. Not sure if they’re gonna be doing that moving forward.

My Apple products backup seamlessly to iCloud, never had an issue.

 

[easysurfer]

I changed from Macrium to Hasleo. Thought I'd give Hasleo a try on a restore after making a full disk copy (was on a Linux machine, but should not matter as I'm just making an image of entire disk). Upon trying to do a restore, got an error saying something like could not decompress.

Well, That's not a confidence boost!

Good thing this is just a test.

 

[NeverBored]

I've had BackBlaze backing up two Macs for years. Had to restore once, with no issues. Also have subscription DropBox for files that need to be accessed from both computers and phone, and iCloud for photos and Apple app files. I have four external drives that have specific backups, and also copy over Documents folders to those occasionally. Still can't always find what I'm looking for. (Where is that photo of DH when he was three, holding his cat?)

 

[GenXguy]

I changed from Macrium to Hasleo. Thought I'd give Hasleo a try on a restore after making a full disk copy (was on a Linux machine, but should not matter as I'm just making an image of entire disk). Upon trying to do a restore, got an error saying something like could not decompress.

Well, That's not a confidence boost!

Good thing this is just a test.

Could be a hardware issue with the backup device. Did you do the image check within Hasleo? Review log files?

 

[easysurfer]

Could be a hardware issue with the backup device. Did you do the image check within Hasleo? Review log files?

Didn't do an image check but know the drive holding the image has no bad sectors. Was a quick and dirty test. Think I'm going to have allocate a day or two one of these days and test more closely.

 

[GenXguy]

Didn't do an image check but know the drive holding the image has no bad sectors. Was a quick and dirty test. Think I'm going to have allocate a day or two one of these days and test more closely.

Today, I did a full image check on my system drive backup, and then completed an image check on a file structure backup. Each took a while, but finished ok.

 

[sengsational]

I guess it was February I moved off of Windows 7 to an Ubuntu based system. My code goes into GitHub, and my documents were rsync to an external USB.

A few days ago, the thing quit booting. After way too much bad AI advice, I finally determined the SSD was failing.

But what I lost was all of the programs I had installed and configured. I was able to mount the drive and copy the home directory to the external USB, but reinstalling and recustomizing, especially the Bottles, has me wanting to find a samurai sword.

 

[easysurfer]

Today, I did a full image check on my system drive backup, and then completed an image check on a file structure backup. Each took a while, but finished ok.

View attachment 64135

My confidence in Hasleo is good now since today I was able to set up a test machine and do some quick testing. Created emergency disk. Created a full back up and an incremental backup. Restored from each back up. Worked out fine. Let the games begin!

 

[Sunset]

I guess it was February I moved off of Windows 7 to an Ubuntu based system. My code goes into GitHub, and my documents were rsync to an external USB.

A few days ago, the thing quit booting. After way too much bad AI advice, I finally determined the SSD was failing.

But what I lost was all of the programs I had installed and configured. I was able to mount the drive and copy the home directory to the external USB, but reinstalling and recustomizing, especially the Bottles, has me wanting to find a samurai sword.

Ouch... bet you were wishing to have had a clone image.

 

[sengsational]

Ouch... bet you were wishing to have had a clone image.

Yes, the plan is to figure out a way to avoid this kind of pain in the future, and I figured a periodic clone that I could boot would be good. That, plus a TimeMachine-like file versioning thing.

I'm glad there were no swords around because it turns out I was able to get most everything running in just a few hours. And now I have two SSD's, plus I might get one under warranty. This will give me the space to implement a nice backup process.

 

[ShokWaveRider]

For years I have used Macrium Reflect to backup my Windows "C" drive. (My Boot Drive). I keep my data on "D, E & F" and I use Syncovery to back that up to my NAS. Macrium has saved me many times in the last 10 years.

 

[easysurfer]

I'm now using Hasleo Backup Suite and chose 21 days retention. Full backup on Sunday. Incremental backup Monday through Saturday.

Should work as follows if all goes well.