
Ask HN: What's your backup solution? - SnowingXIV
Do you keep work and personal separate? Do you use multiple providers like iCloud&#x2F;OneDrive&#x2F;Dropbox&#x2F;Google Drive or do you stick to one? Do you do any type of auto-sync folders?<p>What&#x27;s your process like? I&#x27;m curious on what people to find the most automatic and reliable solution for typical day to day with photos, documents, and their work backups. (Thinking more along the lines of your own side projects or things that you&#x27;re more in control of, less on the corporate side that have imposed solutions and is managed by a team).
======
Rhapso
I own some land in rural TN, with a winterized trailer and access to spring
water. that is backup water and shelter for minimal cost. A person/year of
shelf-stable food (not fun, but indefinitely survivable) is about $1000. So if
I am smart about it, and fall back gracefully, every $3k-$4k in savings is a
year of "backup survival". I still need to make sure I have at least a year's
worth of currency in a liquid form in case of infrastructure or banking
collapse and ideally at least 6-months food dry-packed on site in case
purchasing food while falling back is not viable.

just a reminder, there is a lot more to back up than your hard-drive.

~~~
paulcole
If banking fails your dollars are going to be in a world of hurt. Do you
invest in gold/silver, too?

Unrelated question, what part of TN is your unprotected, cash filled trailer
in?

~~~
Rhapso
My general expectation is to the contrary. I think people underestimate how
psychologically ingrained the dollar is into the american people. Money will
still be worth something, maybe not as much as I like, but something. People
have so much faith in the system, that everybody will be hedging against "when
things get better".

Even then "failure of banking" does not have to be universal. Maybe my assets
are frozen or other similar, localized issues.

In the grand scheme of things, gold is also likely to be difficult to
liquidate. It does not really have any intrinsic value at this point.

As to where: On a hill, by a lake, surrounded by paranoid gulf war vets with
lots of guns.

~~~
dpc59
I would personally stockpile hard liquor if I wanted to hedge for a social
collapse. Whiskey never goes bad, it's always useful and a few ounces can go a
long way.

~~~
groovy2shoes
> _Whiskey never goes bad_

As long as you keep it sealed in an air-tight container and in complete
darkness. Oxygen and/or light will trigger chemical processes that result in
undesirable flavor changes.

Just a heads-up, speaking from experience and research :)

------
greggman
I'm using Arq ([https://www.arqbackup.com/](https://www.arqbackup.com/)) with
Google Cloud Storage. Arq is a stand alone backup program that supports a
bunch of different storage providers. From their site:

> Amazon Cloud Drive, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Storage, Google Drive,
> Dropbox, or OneDrive accounts, or your SFTP server or NAS.

It encrypts locally so I don't have to worry about the backup company reading
my files.

I have 3 backups configured. One for "Documents" which backs up everyday.
Another for Photos (which are stored locally on an external HD) and another
for Music (which apparently everyone but me doesn't own music anymore and just
uses Spotify) both of which I run manually once in a while. If I ever get a
desktop again I'll make those automated.

I deleted my entire hard drive by accident 5 months ago so since that time I
also started using Time Machine to an external drive. It starts nagging me
every 10 days to plug it in.

Also use Google Photo's free service not as backup but just as access to my
photos. Earlier this year I uploaded all 130k photos at their "free"
resolution

I don't backup work. Work does that. Most of it is in git. Same with personal
projects. It's all on github.

~~~
aosaigh
I really wish Arq would make a unix app. If so I would buy licenses for all my
machines.

------
pfarnsworth
Work must always be separate from personal. Period. End of story.

I use Synology. I simply love it. I have RAID 6 which cuts down on the space I
can use, but it gives me the peace of mind that I need, especially after one
of my drives already died and I had to get it replaced. With RAID 6, I had no
impact in speed whatsoever and 2 more drives would have to fail before I lost
anything. Thanks to Amazon, I can get a new drive next day, so the chance of
data loss is relatively small.

I also have an external USB connected to it that I will occasionally do full
backups, every few months (my data doesn't change a huge amount).

Using a Synology plugin, I upload all my pics, encrypted, to Amazon Cloud for
$60/year. I'm still figuring out if it's worth it to expand this to all my
data, given that I don't completely trust how secure this is, and what it
would look like if I did suffer a catastrophic data loss. I'm limited by time
though.

------
senorsmile
For my personal stuff I have a seafile server on a vps. I have 'full history'
turned on, which essentially gives me snapshots of every uploaded change of
every file, browsable by individual file or by date and time for the whole
backup space.

For work stuff, I've been loving borg-backup. Others here have mentioned why
it's superior. I agree. Once they get support for remote object stores like
S3, it will be hands down the best backup solution:
[https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/issues/102](https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/issues/102).
Even though, there is a fuse layer for S3 that may work (haven't tried that
yet).

------
alkonaut
CrashPlan. Dirt cheap for unlimited storage for generational backups for 10
machines. Whole extended family fits in one subscription.

~~~
eps
Tried restoring from it yet?

/r/datahoarders have a long list of horror stories about that. Admittedly,
these guys operate in TBs, but the general feeling on the sub towards
CrashPlan is to avoid it at all costs (no pun intended).

~~~
alkonaut
Yes, it has saved my behind several times.

My requirements are pretty simple: has to work well on windows + mac, has to
be cloud based, have decent bandwidth, unlimited storage, unlimited retention,
and has to and require no configuration of my own apart from selecting files
and schedules.

I just haven't found anything with the level of polish that CrashPlan has in
terms of UI and usability. To avoid having all eggs in one basket I try to
keep at least a mirror of everything too, e.g. on a NAS.

I have been a DataHoarder kind of guy in the past (dabbled with my own backup
scripts, etc.) but found that the chance of user error on my part is probably
an order of magnitude greater than the risk of losing data any other way - and
with user error there is always the risk that you also bork your backups. So I
don't want any system that has any kind of complex configuration on my part.

Further, I don't want to separate the _storage_ from the _backup_ , simply
because buying unlimited cloud storage is to expensive. I don't need fast
random access storage, I need something cheap like glacier, but that quickly
becomes comples. So I'm very happy to hide that complexity behind a cloud
backup provider that gives unlimited retention and storage.

------
krylon
For low-volume data (mostly configuration files) of my personal machines, I
have been using tarsnap for a couple of months now. It has saved me once
already when the µSD card holding the operating system on my home server gave
up the ghost, so I consider it a good investment (it helps that tarsnap is
pretty cheap thanks to deduplication).

For higher volume data (source code, mostly) I use a droplet at Digital Ocean
and keep my data spread across several machines at home.

On my desktop, a Mac Mini, I use Time Machine with an external ~1.7 TB USB
drive that I hook up every couple of days (roughly twice a week).

It is not the most sophisticated arrangement, but it works well enough as
insurance in case a machine suddenly dies. It works less well against
accidentally removing files, but I have cut myself into that particular finger
often enough to finally learn my lesson. ;-) [The downside of this lesson is
that I've become kind of a hoarder when it comes to files. But these days,
disk space is cheap, so it is not that much of a problem.]

------
Gruselbauer
Recently build myself a home box from Ebay parts. Two four core Xeons, 72gb
DDR3 memory and six onboard SATA ports. Two 120gb SSDs running Proxmox on that
for virtualisation and a 2tb drive for misc storage. Bought an LSI 9211 HBA
with another eight SATA ports for fifty euros, which gets PCI passthrough'ed
to a FreeNAS VM. Four cheap 2tb drives for the initial pool.

Another VM provides an instance of NextCloud locally and that's pretty much
it. Works, feels secure enough and didn't cost more than 500€ total. A four
disk Synology Home NAS with drives would cost more and offer significantly
less.

As for online backup, being on satellite internet makes uploading pretty much
anything too painful to even consider.

~~~
mastazi
Yeah, I went the NAS route and now I think I should have built my own server
instead, like you did. I ended up adding an Intel NUC (with Linux Debian)
which does all the work and the NAS is used for storage only. The NAS runs an
extremely stripped-down version of Linux which was not flexible enough for my
needs.

------
maukdaddy
Arq ([https://www.arqbackup.com](https://www.arqbackup.com)) and AWS. As close
to set it and forget it that you can get.

Process:

\- Local TimeMachine backups

\- Arq backup to AWS Glacier

~~~
lobster_johnson
Note that Arq with Glacier only is usually a mistake (as discovered by the
poster below), since restores need to be requested and queued up, and take
_hours_ to come back with the results. Restores are also very expensive.

As an Arq user who used Glacier previously, I much rather recommend using
Google Cloud Storage:

* Nearline restore is instantaneous;

* Storage per month is >30% cheaper [1];

* Recovering data from GCS is super cheap; about 3% (!) of equivalent Glacier costs.

For the super paranoid, GCS also has more expensive multi-region buckets.

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/pricing/tco/storage-
nearline](https://cloud.google.com/pricing/tco/storage-nearline)

~~~
snarf
Arq also supports Amazon Cloud Drive as a target, and if you're in the US,
it's a flat $60 per year for unlimited storage.

~~~
lobster_johnson
There are some Terms of Service [1] items that might come and back and bite
you (or not — who knows, they're a bit vague):

    
    
        The Service is offered in the United States. We may 
        restrict access from other locations. There may be
        limits on the types of content you can store and 
        share using the Service, such as file types we 
        don't support, and on the number or type of devices
        you can use to access the Service.
    

The fact that they "may restrict access from other locations" could be a
problem when you travel.

[1] [http://www.zdnet.com/article/is-amazons-online-storage-
reall...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/is-amazons-online-storage-really-
unlimited-read-the-fine-print/)

------
mvip
I just spent some time this weekend rebuilding my backup routines. In short, I
Borg [1] and multiple targets. For a local target at home, I use a RasPi with
RAID1 [2]).

For company sync/backup, we use AeroFS [3].

[1]
[https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/](https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/)
[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13000024](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13000024)
[3] [https://aerofs.com/](https://aerofs.com/)

------
protomyth
Tarsnap is my preferred backup provider for personal and work. Do be careful
with the key. I also have a OneDrive.

Work stuff also goes on an LTO tape. I guess we are just traditionalists at
heart.

------
dbg31415
I use multiple Blackblaze accounts
([https://www.backblaze.com/](https://www.backblaze.com/)).

My requirements, and why I picked Blackblaze:

1) Work and personal data must be kept separate. (I use multiple Blackblaze
accounts.)

2) Backups must be continuous and happen behind the scenes, I must never have
to manually trigger a backup.

3) Must be able to restore not just a file, but a file on a specific date
(Blackblaze keeps all changes for up to 30 days... wish it was longer but this
hasn't caused me any issues yet).

4) Must be secure, encrypted, and support 2FA.

5) Must allow me to access my files from a different computer, or phone.

6) Must be simple enough that my parents can use it with minimal training
(I've had my 65 year-old mother on Blackblaze for about a year now... no
reason not to keep family safe too).

7) Must be affordable... Blackblaze is like $50 / year per account for
unlimited data. It's 1/2 the price of Dropbox, and you don't have to mess with
any silly simlinks that break when Apple pushes new software updates...

Bottom line, the people at Blackblaze set out to build a product that does
backups right, and for me they are succeeding. I love their product.

~~~
sigjuice
_4) Must be secure, encrypted, and support 2FA._

Doesn't Backblaze require that you enter your password/keyphrase on their
website to restore from an encrypted backup?

~~~
dbg31415
Password to get access to website, plus encryption key phrase on your local
device to unlock your content.

[https://www.backblaze.com/backup-
encryption.html](https://www.backblaze.com/backup-encryption.html)

[https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-
us/articles/217664798-Secur...](https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-
us/articles/217664798-Security-Question-Round-up-)

[https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-
us/articles/217664688-Can-y...](https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-
us/articles/217664688-Can-you-tell-me-more-about-the-encryption-Backblaze-
uses-)

------
williamstein
Bup. [https://github.com/bup/bup](https://github.com/bup/bup)

Git + bloom filters + Python

I backup hundreds of thousands of user accounts at cloud.sagemath.com using
it, plus my own data, etc. I've been using it for four years and haven't found
anything better for my requirements.

~~~
KKKKkkkk1
When I examined the available backup schemes that are were built off of a
content-addressible storage scheme, all of them had one shortcoming or another
except for Borg. If I remember correctly, Bup's shortcoming is that it is git
based and hence architected to be immutable, meaning that pruning old backups
is hairy.

~~~
beagle3
The new bup version can do pruning, FWIW (haven't tried to see how hairy it
actually is).

bup does have a huge advantage of deduplicating multiple machine images that
can backup simulatenously. With Borg, there is a lock held on the repository
(only one machine at a time), and if multiple machines do use the same
repository, they will need to download the indices (Slow compared to bup's
bloom filter), or use sshfs etc (slow)

borg also has internal encryption. If only borg adopts bup's bloom filters and
concurrent access, it will only have advantages...

------
scott113341
Encrypted rclone [1] to local external HDD and Amazon Cloud.

[1] [http://rclone.org](http://rclone.org)

~~~
Nadya
Thanks for making me aware of the existence of rclone. I know what my next
weekend project is. Getting a proper backup system set up. :)

------
adiabatty
I have a 4 TB external USB hard drive split in two equal partitions. One is
dedicated to Time Machine backups and the other has full-disk disk-image
backups made by SuperDuper!. The partition with disk images on it also has
installer files for programs that I can't redownload on a whim.

Since I can only hold a few disk images on a 2 TB drive, I copy these disk
images to a ProLiant MicroServer with a raidz3 (I've since heard this is a bad
idea compared to mirror sets) to give me access to older backups in case my
external drive dies.

I also use Backblaze; it backs up everything on the iMac and the external
drive.

The laptop pretty much doesn't get backed up, but I don't have much state on
there that can't be recreated with `brew install` and `git clone`.

Dropbox syncs some things, but I use SyncThing for syncing large files between
my iMac, MacBook, and Windows machine. I also use a second SyncThing shared
folder to keep my 1Password vault in sync between my iMac and laptop.

~~~
tedmiston
> I also use Backblaze; it backs up everything on the iMac and the external
> drive.

Be careful with that external drive. Backblaze deletes external drive backups
if you don't sync them every 30 days [1]. I've lodged frustrated complaints
with them over data loss but that is their current policy.

[1]: [https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-
us/articles/217664898-What-...](https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-
us/articles/217664898-What-happens-to-my-backups-when-I-m-away-or-on-
vacation-)

------
JoachimSchipper
Tarsnap. I like knowing that cperciva is ensuring the security of my backups.
;-)

------
kowdermeister
I'm in the process of setting up a system. Anyone using Amazon Drive unlimited
storage?
[https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home](https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home)

I'd like to keep my laptop files backed up automatically.

~~~
bad_user
I'm currently using Amazon's Cloud Drive for backups with Arq, see:
[http://arqbackup.com/](http://arqbackup.com/) \- It's a pretty sweet deal, if
it lasts, however no unlimited service is truly unlimited. For example
Microsoft's OneDrive was also unlimited at first.

However, if you end up doing this, it's a pretty bad idea to use your account
for anything else but backups. Especially Amazon's Cloud Drive. And I also
can't speak for how durable the stored data is and it's a good idea if
important data is backed up in two places.

------
millettjon
I use borg for laptops and servers. I use syncthing for (android) phones and
tablets to sync photos/videos to home server where they are then backed up by
borg.

In the past, I have used rdiff-backup and tarsnap.

------
tjbiddle
I live nomadically and am often without a stable-fast internet connection. So
my backup solution has been catered to what I feel makes the most sense to me
(Of course always open to improvements!)

I have a 1TB Google Drive plan; this stores all of my photos - whether coming
in from Google Photos (Uncompressed) on my phone, GoPro, etc. as well as
pretty much any sort of documents - everything goes straight to Drive.
Anything I deem sensitive I throw in an encrypted volume which is then synced.

As I run macOS, I use TimeMachine for Backups - I travel with a 500GB portable
SSD and store TimeMachine on there regularly. This doesn't include
GoogleDrive, or any other data.

If I'm traveling somewhere, I keep my drive and laptop separate in-case one is
lost.

If my computer ever fails, is stolen, etc. then I should be able to purchase a
new one, restore with TimeMachine, and then camp out in an area with fast
internet to restore anything on GoogleDrive I'd like, and should be able to
start working again immediately.

I know I have a single point of failure with only one TimeMachine backup; I'd
like to improve that. However it's also not catastrophic if it's lost; just a
pain in the butt as it'd take me time to get my environment back to the way I
like it.

Recently with the stories of Google locking out their users - I'd like to
setup a routine of storing 'Google Takeout' on some drives and throw those in
storage as I know I have a lot of information in there.

------
bahmboo
Maybe this should be a separate ask HN: what restore solution worked best for
you?

~~~
rosstex
Backblaze. They ship you TB external hard drives with all your data for a fee,
and refund the fee if you return the drives.

~~~
tedmiston
It would great if they would keep that level of convenience for external
drives. Backblaze deleting external drive backups every 30 days [1] is
maddening.

[1]: [https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-
us/articles/217664898-What-...](https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-
us/articles/217664898-What-happens-to-my-backups-when-I-m-away-or-on-
vacation-)

~~~
rosstex
Wow, I didn't know about that.... that's disappointing.

~~~
tedmiston
I'm pretty confident they make it intentionally hidden so you don't know until
it affects you. For example, titling the FAQ "What happens to my backups when
I'm away or on vacation?" vs "What is your external drive retention policy?"

~~~
sincarne
I don't think it's hidden. Backblaze will warn you if it hasn't seen a drive
in a few days, and right in that email is the heads up that the drive will be
deleted. I thought it was also in the external drive management pane of the
app. However if you just let Backblaze do its thing, and don't have warnings
enabled, you might get got good.

~~~
tedmiston
Not the warnings themselves — the fact that your data is not retained on
external drives in the onboarding and FAQ.

------
cweagans
All of my machines get backed up to my Synology NAS. The NAS then syncs all
the backups out to Amazon Drive. It's not "real" offsite backup, but it's good
enough for what I'm doing. In addition, the NAS also syncs music, video, and
images out to Amazon Drive separately so that we can view our media from
anywhere without depending on our home internet connection.

------
mzarate06
All machines in my household get backed up to a home-built NAS. It runs low
power inexpensive hardware that's plenty fast, along w/Linux Mint + Samba to
manage the file shares. I preferred this since I've used Linux most of my life
- I prefer avoiding learning new systems when possible, which is why I'm not
running something like FreeNas, Synology, etc.

------
kejaed
Local backup using Time Machine to a USB HDD plugged into an AirPort Extreme.

Offsite backup to Backblaze.

Photos are also back up on iCloud (paid) & Google Photos (free).

------
mastazi
A little Barebones PC (Intel NUC) used as a sync server, connected to a 9TB
NAS (Thecus N4310 with 4X 3TB HDDs in RAID 5). I do not like the apps included
in the NAS, that's why I use the NUC (with Linux) as the "brain" of the backup
process, which is done by calling rsync through various cron jobs.

The NUC and the NAS are on their own subnet (with a router dedicated to them)
and not accessible from the external network, however the NUC can access a
shared folder on my PC which is where it takes the data from (and then it
saves it to the NAS).

I do have online, cloud-based backup for less sensitive data, so I can access
that while on the move. I use the cloud Drive offer from Mailbox.org (I also
use Mailbox.org for mail/calendar/notes/address book).

Lately I'm thinking of replacing the online part with my own cloud server
though. Probably I could run something like mail-in-a-box and
NextCloud/OwnCloud on my own online VMs. But I'm too lazy and, at least for
now, I trust Mailbox.org.

------
tscs37
Praying and LVM RAID1.

~~~
alexdumitru
That's how real men do it.

------
kikowi
Github for code and Google Drive for documents & photos. Google photos turned
out as the best solution for photo syncing, sharing, simple editing (rotation
with keybind) and unlimited free storage of pretty good quality photos. Google
documents turned out as the most practical editor (cloud, sharing, all the
basic editing commands). I am on the unix systems most of the time and I
always find something missing in Pages or LibreOffice. If word was available
on all systems I would probably use it together with dropbox, not because I
prefer word, but because most of files I get are in word's format and if I
have to change and help with something, its best to do it in word.

I don't really have anything else to backup. What do you guys have on your
systems to require complete system backup?

~~~
adiabatty
I have all kinds of dotfiles I'd hate to recreate from scratch. Mostly
application configuration stored in ~/Library or /usr/local.

~~~
peterbraden
github works well for dotfiles.

------
kohanz
Personal (family) stuff - I have a 3TB NAS in a RAID1 configuration at home
that my wife and I save our photos and videos to. We also back up our personal
documents and such there. We are not super-prolific in terms of media
creation, so currently I think we only have about 200GB worth of files. About
3 times a year, I make a copy of the drive and store it in a safety deposit
box at our bank (e.g. in case the house burns down). I just don't like the
idea of our entire set of family photos and videos in the cloud.

Work - I'm a consultant/freelancer, so for some things I rely on the client's
backup systems and for things that are more my own responsibility, I rely
mostly on cloud version control (github, bitbucket), as my work artifacts are
mostly code.

------
TAForObvReasons
Anything even remotely important gets printed out on paper. Even source code.
I was burned once when one of my computers died and my NAS died while trying
to recall the backup.

On a semi-related note, I find it easier to read printed code and mark changes
than to stare at the screen.

~~~
stinos
So do you print the source again after every change? And what happens to the
then obsolete paper with the previous version? (or do they get version
numbers?)

------
dagw
Backblaze. Set it up and forget about it. I've done a handful of recoveries
and it's never failed.

I also have dropbox and sync most of my code to bitbucket/github, but I don't
really consider that "backup" even if I can sometimes use it as such.

------
terom
I use rsync, mostly to backup from LVM snapshots over SSH to either rsync
--link-dest snapshots or ZFS snapshots.

[https://gitlab.paivola.fi/tech/pvl-
backup](https://gitlab.paivola.fi/tech/pvl-backup)

~~~
Kim_Bruning
Do you also keep your zfs snapshots around?

(they're a lot more efficient than lvm snapshots. One machine I use took
snapshots every half hour, and we accidentally filled it up with >3000
snapshots before anyone noticed that the reaper script for old snapshots
wasn't running :-P . No performance degradation!)

------
mooneater
Currently setting up rclone+duplicity -> rsync.net

rsync.net partly because I want a solution whereby if an attacker ever gains
access to our credentials, they could not wipe all of our backups, a la
[http://www.infoworld.com/article/2608076/data-
center/murder-...](http://www.infoworld.com/article/2608076/data-
center/murder-in-the-amazon-cloud.html) . Most other backup stories do not
survive that type of threat.

rclone because it allows consolidation of various cloud data (sending that to
rsync.net in case they ever get damanaged/wiped).

work+personal separate of course.

------
jenkstom
For home: Synology NAS backing up to glacier weekly. It doesn't get a lot of
use, so it's very cost effective.

For work: projects on gitlab.com and servers (all Linux-based servers) I use
Backup Ninja. Backup Ninja is really just a front-end for several other
packages, making it easy to setup backups via SSH on a remote server.

Databases are backed up locally, then everything is backed up to a remote
server using rdiff. I can have 30 or 60 days of backups for a relatively small
cost. The backups go to a 2TB server hosted by another cloud provider, which
is more space than I need.

------
lobster_johnson
Arq [1] with Google Cloud Storage here, scheduled nightly. See my other
comments about pricing:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13000979](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13000979).

Arq supports multiple sources and targets. When a source is an external hard
disk that is only occasionally plugged in, Arq does the sensible thing and
backs up the disk when it's plugged in, but otherwise leaves it alone.

[1] [https://www.arqbackup.com](https://www.arqbackup.com)

------
therobot24
I used to use backblaze, but their client would take up too much space - i've
commented on here about it before being very buggy. So i switched to amazon
cloud and have been syncing files that way.

------
gizmo686
I have three backup systems.

My main backup is a local harddrive formatted with btrfs. I have a script in
cron.daily that runs rsync then makes a btrfs snapshot.

In addition to that, I run crashplan to back up my computer to the cloud. In
some sense, this is actually my main backup because I trust them far more than
I trust my own backup system, but it is not as convenient to restore from than
a local drive (but still quiete convenient).

I also keep have a two small hard-drives in a safety deposit box. These drives
are exact mirrors of each other and tested/updated once a year.

------
theandrewbailey
Work: A 1TB external enclosure. That's more for "oh shit my work laptop's SSD
failed" backup. The real work is done on Bitbucket and a Google Apps account.
I do not manage the servers.

Home: My home server has a 4TB main backup drive and a 2TB redundant drive
(easily downloaded "safe" stuff, like steam, origin, gog backups). The 4TB
drive is synced to 3 other 4TB external drives that I swap between home, work,
and my parent's house (100+ miles away).

All encrypted of course, whether it's Bitlocker or LUKS.

------
xfactor973
I can't promise this won't eat your lunch and pee on the floor but I've added
a Ceph backed to
preserve:[https://github.com/cholcombe973/preserve](https://github.com/cholcombe973/preserve)
I'll be adding integration tests with checksums to verify integrity this week.
If anyone wants to build another backend I'd be happy to merge it.

------
tatotato
Github for my contracts.

My music collection sits on a server hooked up to my stereo. I had the disks
in RAID-Z1, but when one of the disks pulled a Seagate I accidentally made the
disks striped vedvs. To back this up, I boot up a rackmount server with larger
disks in RAID-Z1 and use rsync.

This is the only data that I really care about preserving. I found this out
through changing my operating system a lot and having my laptop stolen.

~~~
brookside
I gleefully deleted my music collection after being back in the USA and able
to use Spotify. Having access to a astounding quantity of music without having
to maintain a library is so, so freeing.

~~~
dublinben
There's a lot of music that isn't available on Spotify. You also lose access
to that "astounding quantity of music" as soon as you stop paying your monthly
fee.

~~~
brookside
Don't use scare quotes it's rude.

------
aysfrm11
Cloudberry Backup (closed source, proprietary, 30USD) with Backblaze B2
(0.005/GB/month). Once it is setup it runs in the background and just does its
thing. I just migrated from Cloudberry/Glacier to Cloudberry/B2 and dont see
any reason for using Glacier any more. Data is locally encrypted.

~~~
tedmiston
Just curious to hear a little more about your choice of B2 over Glacier or S3.
I haven't seen much written about it yet. Do retention policies work with B2?

------
hummerbliss
1\. I have a synology which acts as central store for everything. 2\.
Everything on synology (except for videos) gets backed up to crashplan. 3\.
Once every few months I backup synology to my 5TB external drive.

I hate to loose any file even if its not important :) I still have files from
the floppy disk era.

------
webgurl83
I backup my main system to Backblaze, and then back it up to an external drive
every month or so. That external drive gets plugged into my laptop and the
files get copied there. Yeah, I have Dropbox, but I also have a music
collection that's a bit too big.

------
pkaye
For my personal systems, I use rsnapshot to make incremental copies on a
nightly basis into another internal SSD used only for backup. Because I only
use SSD, the whole thing runs under a minute. Then monthly this gets it copied
into an USB external HDD.

------
shados
I have a synology box with a pair of drives in RAID 1. That's not bad, but if
something happens to that or my places goes on fire, well, I'll lose it all.

So I need a remote backup solution for it. I haven't found anything cheap and
satisfactory yet...

------
tombrossman
Daily Duplicity snapshots that sync to S3, plus hourly snapshots via Back In
Time to an internal drive, plus an occasional manual rsync to a portable USB
drive off-site.

Probably overkill, but if one backup method ever has a flaw I'm still fine.

~~~
sean_patel
> Probably overkill,

Yeah.. I was about to say. LOL. Have you even been in a situation where you
had to restore?

~~~
tombrossman
Yes, I regularly test the backups by restoring a random directory to my
desktop and then opening a few random files to test. For things like photos
which don't change (as opposed to a document which may have been edited) I'll
do a quick spot-check of file hashes as well.

I'm picky about backups and have never had an issue where files were
permanently lost. I'm to the point now where if I'm not sure I want a file
I'll go ahead and delete it, and then if I need it later I restore from the
Back In Time snapshot.

Storage is dirt cheap, so spend the time up front getting your backup 'idiot
proof' and automatic and it's totally worth it in the long term.

~~~
sean_patel
Storage is indeed cheap. I've just had a hard time figuring out how to set
everything up and validate it. Thank you for the detailed explanation.

------
unstatusthequo
Locally: QNAP NAS which accepts Time Machine backups from Apple computers. The
NAS also runs a Linux container with SpiderOak on it for any NAS-only data and
critical time machine backups. Endpoints also have SpiderOak.

------
slantyyz
A combination of a NAS, Crashplan (I may be switching to BackBlaze) and
occasionally burning critical data to BluRay discs for cold storage.

On my work desktop I also do incremental Acronis images and Windows File
History on local drives.

~~~
fraXis
Why do you want to switch from Crashplan to Backblaze?

~~~
slantyyz
I have become less and less of a fan of the software over time.

------
jarnix
Personal: cloud server (it's quite expensive, like 40€/month but it's the best
I could find) with rsync without --delete

Pro: backuppc (used at a "large" scale without issues) or snapshots on big
fileservers

------
codegeek
I use aws-cli tools. I create buckets on S3 and then use a simple script:

    
    
        aws s3 sync <source> s3://<bucket-name> --delete
    

If needed, put this in a cron and you are good to go

------
seanwilson
GitHub and Google Drive are enough for me really. I don't backup what isn't
important and subscribe to services for consuming music/movies/tv so I only
have a small amount to store.

------
msh
Dropbox + spideroak.

Dropbox for non sensitive stuff and spideroak for complete PC backup.

------
egypturnash
Time Machine + Backblaze.

------
tibu
Everything personal (local drives, Google Drive, Dropbox) goes to my Synology
NAS, NAS is backed up weekly to S3. The best thing in Synology is that it
solves this out-of-the box.

~~~
tibu
Oh and forgot, that server stuff is backed up to another server with rdiff-
backup. Some years ago this was the quickest solution and until now never had
any issues with it.

------
infinityplus1
Dropbox for most stuff. External HDD for manual image backups.

------
prohor
1\. Daily: rsync snapshots to disk attached to Raspberry Pi (similar to
rsnapshot)

2\. Periodically: duplicity to Oracle archive storage (7x cheaper than AWS
Glacier - $0.001)

------
bhauer
Encrypted rclone [1] with multiple cascaded self-hosted peers.

[1] [http://rclone.org/](http://rclone.org/)

------
fsloth
A separate file server (QNap) that backups in CrashPlan, and to an external
USB drive. Not ideal, but works.

I don't bring work back to home.

------
closeparen
Crashplan with user-specified encryption key.

------
anotherevan
I use rsnapshot each night to an encrypted external drive. The drive gets
swapped each week with one kept off-site.

------
twblalock
I definitely keep work and personal data separate. There are a number of legal
and ethical reasons for this.

------
nextos
rsync to btrfs volume, then take a snapshot. 2 LOC.

I do this to a pen drive on site and to a remote volume.

------
zeroer
I'd probably be what you'd call a digital nomad. I keep a Time Machine backup
on a ruggedized external drive, and I use Backblaze. I've been very happy with
Backblaze, if that's what you're asking about. Additionally, Google Drive and
another external USB flash drive for a couple sensitive documents.

I don't work.

~~~
mythrwy
well you probably don't have that much to back up then:)

~~~
zeroer
Heh, no. ;)

------
gianouts
Timemachine, Backblaze and a bit of Dropbox (particularly for syncing photos
from phone)

------
module0000
_Personal_ backups are done with Dropbox, which stores several EncFS
collections.

------
tempestn
For the most part I keep work and home separate, although there is some
overlap as I exclusively work from home. I have several backup processes:

First, I take automatic daily differential backup images of the primary hard
drive on my main desktop. (This is a Windows machine, so I use Macrium
Reflect.) Images are great because if your drive dies or gets corrupted, you
drop in a new one, copy the image over, and are back up and running as quickly
as possible.

For the same reason I take images of the volumes on my home Linux server. For
this I take an LVM snapshot, mount it, create a tarball, then unmount and
remove the snapshot. These are only done monthly because the process isn't
incremental or differential, so takes longer, and the contents don't change as
often anyway. It could be completely automated, but I just have a script that
I run manually, because I like to do any updates that have the potential to
break things while the snapshots are open for ease of rollback. (I have a
monthly calendar reminder to do this along with quickly checking that my
various other backups are running properly, and backing up my phone using
Helium.)

I continuously mirror the user folder from my desktop (and my wife's computer)
to a Samba share on the home server using FreeFileSync. (There are many
different ways to sync files, but since the desktops are on windows, this was
easiest.) Then I run Crashplan on the home server to do incremental cloud
backups of all these files, both to deal with the worst case scenario of the
house burning down, as well as to catch any files changed intra-day, not
caught by the daily disc images.

Misc: Regarding the phone backup, my preference is to do a full disc image,
for the same reason as on the computers - break your phone and you can replace
it and be back where you started in no time. Unfortunately that requires
rooting, and in Samsung Hell rooting permanently devalues your phone due to
Knox insanity. So for now I back up those apps that allow it with Helium, a
couple of high priority ones using their built-in backups, and grumble about
how I should just root. I also usually only bother to do this every few
months, since anything really important on the phone is in the cloud anyway.

Except photos. I run FolderSync on the phone to continually sync any new
photos to my OwnCloud on the home server via WebDAV (from which they're backed
up to Crashplan), as well as back to Google via their photos backup tool, but
in "standard" res - not as a backup, but just so I have my full photo library
accessible on my phone.

I also occasionally fire up Thunderbird to download email from Gmail. I use
the web client exclusively, but like to keep a local copy of all my email on
the off chance I'm ever somehow locked out. It's highly unlikely, but the
peace of mind costs all of 5 seconds every couple months.

I think that's it. Sounds like a lot, but I set it up incrementally over time,
and for the most part it all just works. If I were setting things up fresh,
I'd probably save some time by paying for more Google storage or something
rather than using OwnCloud, and by using the CrashPlan family plan rather than
syncing everything to the home server then backing up from there. Regardless,
I do believe it's good practice to double-check whatever you use for your
backups, at least every couple months.

(This is all leaving aside the Tempest servers, which use various RAID,
master/slave SQL, LVM snapshot backups of the same sort I do locally, and
rsync to off-site storage.)

------
avitzurel
Arq.

S3 and google drive.

~~~
RKearney
+1 for Arq. I use the 1TB of storage I get with my Office 365 subscription to
backup my Documents, keys, photos, and other volatile files. Everything else
gets backed up to AWS Glacier.

------
VladimirGolovin
Backblaze. Works great, $5 for unlimited space, covers everything.

------
gesman
crashplan.com

Works on Windows, Mac and Linux, $150/yr gets you unlimited number of machines
and unlimited storage, it keeps unlimited versions for recovery.

Also important - data sent to cloud encrypted.

------
edp
I use rsnaphot, with ssh to backup remote hosts/servers.

------
wineisfine
Crashplan. Its awesome

~~~
GFischer
We have Crashplan at work. Haven't needed to use it yet, but it gets out of
the way and it seems like a good solution.

------
perakojotgenije
Bitbucket for work backup and spideroak for personal files.

------
Yaggo
Two Time Capsules in separate buildings.

------
hga
Retired, so no need for work/personal separation, but I never did it before,
but made sure that my company knew any work I did at home was going onto my
general tape backups and was not going to be deleted any time soon after I
left the company.

Nowadays: most important stuff, rsync.net, more than a bit expensive at 20
cents/GB/month, but their many other virtues and especially simplicity make up
for it, including support of private git repoes. currently $9.60/month, that's
a grandfathered price in that now the minimum you start with is larger.

Saved my email repository and a fair amount else when the Joplin 2011 tornado
trashed the machine that it was on as well as my BackupPC discs which were in
another room that suffered the only wall breach (my main system came through
fine, and that near miss of losing everything else prompted me to start using
tape again, LTO-4 was capacious and cheap enough by then, I'd long outgrown
DAT).

Most of most important stuff with BackupPC to a 1GB USB 3.0 drive (would be
all to a bigger drive, and will be when the next item changes state, but I'm
economizing now).

Since my 2 2TB bulk drives are all over 5 years old now, they're getting
nightly rsynced to a new 4 TB drive on my other system, which when one of them
fails will physically replace both of them.

Backstopping all of that, a LTO-4 tape drive on my other system, tar
incrementals every night, those tapes cycled every week from a pool of 5, then
full backups every month, which are put off-site sometime during the month.

Now that I've got a serious Internet connection, if I was starting over, and
didn't have the sunk costs of the LTO-4 tape drive system (drive, SAS
controller, fast disk to feed it) and plenty of tapes, I'd probably do this
level of backup to the cloud at a fairly raw level to S3, Glacier, GCS, or
Backblaze.

~~~
tedmiston
> Now that I've got a serious Internet connection, if I was starting over, and
> didn't have the sunk costs of the LTO-4 tape drive system (drive, SAS
> controller, fast disk to feed it) and plenty of tapes, I'd probably do this
> level of backup to the cloud at a fairly raw level to S3, Glacier, GCS, or
> Backblaze.

Personal warning to anyone else attempting to create a multi-drive setup with
Backblaze. Backblaze deletes external drive backups if you don't sync them
every 30 days [1]. I've lodged frustrated complaints with them over data loss
but that is their current policy.

[1]: [https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-
us/articles/217664898-What-...](https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-
us/articles/217664898-What-happens-to-my-backups-when-I-m-away-or-on-
vacation-)

~~~
hga
Errr, I mean their new low cost raw storage B2 Cloud Storage (now 0.001
cent/month more than Glacier
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13010949](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13010949)),
not their total solutions for those not wanting to go to that sort of
trouble/complexity/whatever.

(As someone who's been using tape drive backups since 1978, DECtape to start
with, fortunately before I learned the -rf flags for rm ^_^, I'm not a
conventional user.)

------
bbcbasic
Gave up on cloud backups. Takes too long on onedrive. Dropbox too expensive.

For personal I now use easeus todo on Windows. Keep a backup hdd at work and
at home.had

For work I let them take care of it. I connect to VM and it's all backed up.

------
cheiVia0
[http://obnam.org/](http://obnam.org/)

------
vuanotin
My backup solution is #YOLO

