Ask HN: What's your backup setup? Manual or Automated? - cdvonstinkpot
======
philip1209
1) I use a time machine drive at my desk. This is useful for quick recovery.

2) I use backblaze (with encryption) for continuous backups to the cloud.

Backblaze was super useful once when I had a drive fail as I was traveling. I
was able to retrieve my SSH keys immediately and continue working in the
cloud. It also provides reassurance that, if there were an event such as
robbery or fire at my apartment, losing my laptop and time machine drive
together would not be catastrophic.

A final tip - I use [http://tripmode.ch](http://tripmode.ch) to disable
backblaze / dropbox / box / google drive / spotify backups while tethering, on
bad wifi, on airplanes, etc. I find this tool essential to managing all of the
services that continually sync in the background.

------
dsr_
Here's what happens with manual backups:

Day 1: Let's test this! Hey, it works.

Day 2: Right, I should run this.

Day 3: This takes a long time.

Day 4: Maybe I should do this weekly.

Day 15: Right, time to do a backup.

Day 23: Weekly backup. This takes a really long time...

Day 45: I should do a backup next time I have time.

Day 421: Where are my backups?

Aesop says: only automated backups keep happening. Only backups that send you
a message when anything at all goes wrong are worth having.

I say: nobody wants backups. Everyone wants restores.

------
gh02t
Attic ( [https://attic-backup.org/](https://attic-backup.org/) ) backups to my
home NAS, then the NAS backs up to CrashPlan. I keep a certain number of
daily/weekly/monthly snapshots and the backup script prunes once a day and
verifies once every other day.

I also like to encrypt my backups before uploading them to CrashPlan. Each
machine has a randomly generated key and the list of keys are then encrypted
with a master key. I back up the list of keys to CrashPlan as well, but the
master key is not. Instead, I split the key using Shamir's secret sharing and
left copies of the component keys in a variety of places. If something ever
totally destroys my home and I lose my local copy of the master key I can
recover it by recombining a certain number of the component keys.

~~~
wsha
I have been looking into both of these technologies recently.

Attic has the most attractive feature set of the backup management tools I
have looked at (deduplication and compression, support for remote repos, built
in encryption, ability to mount repo as a FUSE file system), with the main
downsides being that it is fairly new (and so just doesn't have as much
testing as some of the older options) and its development model is not ideal.
It is solely maintained by the original developer as a personal project and so
when he is busy development stops. Recently, a handful of active community
contributors started a fork
([https://borgbackup.github.io/](https://borgbackup.github.io/)) because of
this. The original developer still seems committed to working on Attic when
time permits, but I'd prefer to see a team of capable developers maintaining
something I was relying for the integrity of my data.

CrashPlan was the most attractive offsite backup solution because its price
was competitive (similar to several other options, ~$6/month to backup one
computer with no data size limit) and it provided cross-platform support for
Windows, OS X, and Linux. I also like that it has a few different encryption
options, including the option to generate your own encryption key that you do
not share with CrashPlan.

I am curious about your decision to encrypt your data before uploading with
CrashPlan. Are you trying to avoid storing any unencrypted data on your NAS
because it is more exposed to the internet? Or do you not trust CrashPlan with
your data? I would think that using CrashPlan with a custom key would be
fairly secure. If you don't trust CrashPlan in that case, you probably
shouldn't install it on your machine at all. The CEO of CrashPlan has
commented on double encrypting data
([http://superuser.com/a/589686](http://superuser.com/a/589686)).

What is the restore process like when combining Attic and CrashPlan? I don't
think CrashPlan has any file system mount option, so you would need to restore
an entire Attic repo to recover any files from it, correct? I guess this is
okay since you have the NAS to restore from for individual file backup and you
only need to restore from CrashPlan in the case of catastrophic failure (the
NAS dies entirely) when you would need to do a full restore.

My current backup solution is an rsync script backing up to a remote machine I
own. I previously used Bitcasa for offsite backup but was unhappy with the
service and with the way the company kept changing its business model (shifted
away from consumer cloud storage to a business / app market). I'd like to
replace my rsync script with something more sophisticated like Attic and use
another offsite option like CrashPlan.

~~~
gh02t
I encrypt the data before shipping it off to CrashPlan mostly because it's the
most flexible. I have a small amount of "sensitive" data related to my
research work. It's not really anything that is actually worth protecting IMO,
but I'm obligated to meet certain requirements when storing it. Encrypting it
before uploading lets me have more fine-grained control over how it's
encrypted. I also like to use different keys for different machines. I do
actually trust CrashPlan, but I like doing it this way. The NAS isn't exposed
to the internet, so that's not the issue.

Restoring from CrashPlan is basically as you describe. Assuming my home NAS
isn't destroyed, I've just restored from the appropriate Attic repo for the
machine off the NAS. If the NAS was destroyed too, well I'd have to restore
from CrashPlan. My backups are targeted though, so a full restore is only at
most like a TB of data (basically, my documents, configuration files and music
collection).

------
thaumaturgy
I use BackupPC
([http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/](http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/)) on an
always-on 8-watt Fit-PC2 ([http://www.fit-pc.com/web/products/fit-
pc2/](http://www.fit-pc.com/web/products/fit-pc2/)). BackupPC grabs twice-
daily backups of my servers and once-daily backups of my personal machine, and
emails me if there's any trouble. The backups aren't dependent on any third-
party service, I don't have to worry about who else has access to the files
and data on my personal system, and I habitually check its web interface for
extra peace of mind.

I think it's hands-down the best cross-platform backup system currently
available, but for some reason it's not a popular approach.

~~~
organsnyder
Seconded for BackupPC. I've been using it since I first saw a release
announcement for it on Slashdot ~15 years ago. I combined it with automated
weekly archival uploads to an off-site server (that I was also using for other
purposes), as well as a manual monthly transfer I would make to an external
hard drive (that would otherwise remain powered off, in case someone/something
managed to get access to all of my live machines).

------
carlchenet
If your backups are automated, you need an automated backup checker in order
to ensure your backups are reliable and will work the very day you'll need
them
[https://github.com/backupchecker/backupchecker](https://github.com/backupchecker/backupchecker)

~~~
_dark_matter_
But who checks the automated backup checker?

------
zhte415
No one at time of posting has mentioned standardized backup being stored in
physical copy off site.

Low risk, high impact events do happen.

Copying my harddrive to USB and storing them in the same room doesn't protect
against a lot of other failures - fire, theft, other social or natural
disaster.

For a small company or startup: Code is often versioned. Is everything else?
Perhaps buy a cheap USB stick for a dump of all admin files that could have an
impact should they get corrupted? Make a copy each week and stick on a new USB
stick to put in your car's glove box (hopefully getting full, as you have a
stack of backups - the is super important for audits: as a manager you should
be able to trace changes in office documents easily, something someone more
naïve would assume is covered up - I've seen it happen).

Copying to the cloud puts a lot of trust in the cloud being there in the event
of a failure. If the technological connectivity causes of failure for my
business and the cloud are independent this makes a lot of sense. Not when
passwords can be easily shared, floppy disk controllers introduce rooting
vulnerabilities, etc.

An off-site physical medium makes a lot of sense for backups. Encrypt a USB
stick and keep it in your car. If you have an office with multiple sites, send
a USB/HDD/SD containing backups every couple of weeks.

Low probability, high impact events do happen. And they have an irrecoverable
impact.

Have a routine. Then, as others have said, you have a recovery solution, not a
backup.

------
jasonellis
MacBook Pro (mine), MacBook Air (wife's). Both backup important data to
CrashPlan's servers and also use the CrashPlan app to backup everything to my
home server.

The home server is running Windows 8.1 with SSD for OS drive, a 2TB drive with
other data (movies, tv shows, photos, home videos, downloadeds, dropbox, etc).
Four more drives of various sizes and models (gradually moving to 3TB+ WD
Reds) are pooled together using DriveBender with duplication. This drive pool
is where the local CrashPlan backups are stored, as well as occasional full
disk images before OS upgrades. The server's own OS and data drives are also
backed up to the drive pool with CrashPlan and to CrashPlan Central

All home photos and videos are also backed up to Google+ Photos. All documents
are scanned, stored in Evernote, and shredded.

All of the computer backup is automated.

The photo backup is automatic, but organization takes my intervention. My
phone and my wife's both upload 2048x2048 images to our Google accounts. They
also backup full res images to my Dropbox. Once a month or so, I transfer the
full res images to the home server and upload any good ones (of our son) to
Google+ in full res to share with our families.

Document backup is a pain in the ass. I just collect a bunch of mail and
documents on my desk and every so often I use my Fujitsu ScanSnap to scan it
all and it automatically uploads to Evernote. Sometimes I label them by date,
but I've been to lazy to do that lately, they get thrown in an archive
notebook and I rely on search.

I think this pretty well follows the 3-2-1 rule.

------
ttaylorr
Arq backs up my OS X machine and dumps the files into an S3 Glacier instance.
Arq is inexpensive, and so is the S3 instance, so this setup works for me.

Arq has failed a few times without telling me, so I am not going to maintain a
solely Arq-based setup in the longterm, but it's fine for now.

In the future, I'd like to add some redundancy, and backup to a location that
I have physical control over. For now, however, I am pretty confident in this
setup.

------
eropple
I have a PowerEdge server at home with two different sets of hot-swap drives,
a 6x500GB in RAID6 and 2x2TB in RAID1. It also has one top bay for easy hot-
swap.

The RAID6 array is for nested-VM experiments with OpenStack, ESXi, etc.,
whereas the 2x2TB drives are in RAID1 and exposed to NFS and Samba. My Mac
uses this share to store its Time Capsule data, plus just general crap I need
to put somewhere and a full sync of my Dropbox and SpiderOak directories. I've
got a cron job on the box that detects when a drive's been plugged into the
hotswap bay and rsyncs from the RAID1 array to that disk around 3AM. It sends
me a Pushover message when it's done the sync, and sometime during the week I
cycle that drive out to my safe-deposit box and plug its alternate in.
Occasionally I verify these backups by plugging them into my desktop's hot-
swap SATA bay, but for the most part I'm confident in their success at this
point so that's not an every-week thing.

I do cloud architecture and stuff at work, but for my own data I'm more
comfortable knowing where, physically, my canonical copies are.

------
Fradow
Manual: Time Machine using 2 hard-drive (different models to lower probability
of both going down at the same time), one at work, one at home (I sync mainly
when Time Machine nudge me every 10 days), which takes care of "something
burns down" scenario. Also, a separate hard-drive for sizable personal media
(raw photos/videos I don't intend to use soon), which is the only weak point
(I should research Amazon Glacier or similar technology)

Automated: all important work also lives online (Github for code, Google Drive
for documents, Gmail keeps all conversation).

Apart from the media hard-drive, I think this follows the 3-2-1 rule for back-
up:

\- Have at least three copies of your data. (3 full copies, fragmented data
online)

\- Store the copies on two different media. (2 HD, 1 SSD, online)

\- Keep one backup copy offsite. (2 full copies at different sites)

------
cpncrunch
Both my server and my dev machine have RAID-1. In addition:

\- My server does an automated full backup once a week to OVH's free backup
space (on a separate nfs drive), and an incremental backup once a day.

\- My dev server (a synology NAS) does a daily backup of my important stuff
(basically all my code and documents) to a backup on the RAID drive.

\- Once every 2 weeks I manually download a full backup from my main server to
my NAS.

\- Occasionally I upload the "important stuff" backup from my NAS to my main
server.

I don't regularly test my backups, but occasionally I need to extract
something (because I delete something by mistake), so that tests them. I also
check my logfiles regularly, so I would notice any RAID failures, failed
backups, etc.

I think my procedures are sufficient for my purposes. Having RAID really helps
with peace of mind!

------
gegtik
Time Machine backup to my Synology NAS, then a time-honored offsite backup --
I clone my drive and physically leave the latest copy at my parents' house.

every time I visit I bring a newer drive and swap.

Simple, cost effective, foolproof.

------
hkhanna
Automated Portion: Every morning at 7:30am, a cron job runs to rsync my main
computer's /home directory to my NAS that is sitting in a closet. The NAS has
two drives that are mirrored to guard against hard drive failure. Every
Saturday morning, a homebrewed script will separately check to make sure all
my backups are current and will email me to advise me that everything is
current and OK. If there is a problem, it will tell me which days are missing.

Manual Portion: Once every couple months, I backup the portion of my /home
directory that is not heavy media like video to a large USB stick, which I
keep at my office.

I don't love this setup, particularly because (1) an offsite backup does not
happen automatically, (2) my video is not backed up offsite, and (3) it is not
resilient to natural disasters in my area, since both my home and office are
within a half-mile of each other in downtown New York City.

Moreover, because I keep my NAS mounted even when no backup is in progress, my
backups are vulnerable to malicious code executed even at the non-superuser
level. For example, a while back there was a bug in some gaming software
(Steam?) where a script executed that would rm -rf /* because of a badly
written shell script. If that had happened to me, it would wipe my /home
directory and my NAS backup.

Eventually, I'd like to set up a Raspberry Pi running in another area of the
country and have rsync push daily backups over ssh to that offsite computer.

------
anotherevan
Cron job backs our two PCs up to an encrypted USB drive overnight, every
night, using rsnapshot.

Backs up Linux PC (where the drive is attached) and Windows PC (via rsync
courtesy of Cygwin).

Rotate the USB drive with its off-site partner every Wednesday (cron job
emails me a reminder that morning.)

Every January I replace the external USB drives with new ones.

That's the PCs.

For our phones, contacts are handled in OwnCloud and using CardDAV[1] to two-
way synchronise with the phones. This also is really nice as I can manage and
edit contacts on the desktop as I like to avoid data entry on pokey little
phone screen keyboards if I can help it. (I also use the contact data for
other things such as caller ID info popping up on the TV when the home phone
rings, so a single source that updates everywhere is handy.)

Use Titanium Backup[2] to backup phones daily, and FolderSync[3] to SFTP said
backups to the desktop PC periodically (along with two-way sync of photos on
the phone).

[1]
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.cardd...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.carddav.Sync)

[2]
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.keramidas....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.keramidas.TitaniumBackup)

[3]
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.andro...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.android.foldersync.full)

------
rrauenza
I used to use BackupPC for onsite backups (which is a great product!), but
wasn't comfortable with my lack of an offsite. I've since moved to Crashplan
([http://www.code42.com/crashplan/](http://www.code42.com/crashplan/)), mostly
because they have a Linux client as well as Windows and also allow peer to
peer backups.

------
edge17
I use Time Machine. One thing I learned recently is there are a bunch of files
that Time Machine doesn't backup -
[http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/131399/what-
folders...](http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/131399/what-folders-can-
be-safely-excluded-from-time-machine-backup)

In my case, I use nvAlt as a note taking tool. nvAlt stores the interim
changes (have not yet been persisted to the database) in ~/Library/Cache or
something, which is on the exclusion list for Time Machine. Since I never
really restart my machine or close the programs I use daily, the changes never
really got backed up (I had months of notes that were not persisted). Long
story short, I had to restore from a Time Machine backup, which mostly worked
but I did lose some stuff.

I keep the time machine exclusion list pretty slim now because, frankly I
don't care if my backup has caches and other garbage in it. I much rather
prefer recovering things in a stateful manner that's least disruptive to my
work.

~~~
xasos
I wish Apple did backups to the cloud (which would make iCloud indispensable
and a lot more useful).

I hope one of the storage giants (Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, etc.) rolls out
an automatic backup service that makes backing up your computer to the cloud
really cheap. This could probably also be accomplished with a quick Python
script.

~~~
emsy
Why don't you use Backblaze or CrashPlan?

~~~
xasos
Wow didn't know those existed, thanks! I think I will try Backblaze :)

------
sp332
[https://www.backblaze.com/](https://www.backblaze.com/) when I was mostly
using Windows. $5/mo or $50/year per computer with no limit on filesize!
Seriously, I've had multiple terabytes on there and it never complained. And
the upload speeds keep getting faster.

One limitation of Backblaze is a limited file history. If a file gets modified
and you don't notice, the old version will eventually disappear. So I have my
"important" stuff in a Dropbox account with "packrat" enabled for infinite
history.

My Linux-based data is on a RAID-1 which is _not_ backup. But I can't find a
cheap enough service to hold another 7.5TB of data.

(Also I'm going to plug Archive Team's backup of the Internet Archive.
[http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK/g...](http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK/git-
annex_implementation) If you have a Mac or Linux box, put your spare hard disk
space to good use.)

------
mercora
I use a combination of LVM thin volume snapshots and btrfs snapshots. While i
could do fine without btrfs snapshots i like to have the ability to browse old
versions online in order to diff or restore them. The thin volume pool is
mirrored using lvm's rather new raid1 volume types (not the mirror type). If
the filesystem fails (which happened twice already) i can merge the working
LVM snapshot back and loose at max a day worth of work. However if the LVM
fails i have an offline copy with the same setup (LVM and btrfs) where i use
btrfs send/receive functionality. But if this happens i will loose some days
of work. If both LVM VGs fail im lost. The offline copy also holds more btrfs
snapshots than the online one in order to reduce disk usage on the online
storage. I do it all manually but i am planning to do the btrfs snapshots
automatically. However, the LVM snapshots wont ever happen automatically as i
don't want to snapshot a bad filesystem and i am unsure how to reliably detect
filesystem errors without using the system.

------
theandrewbailey
Windows desktop: has script to sync a handful of directories to Linux server.
Run manually. Desktop has another drive that has images of the other drives
and backups of game service downloads (Steam, GOG, etc.) that aren't anywhere
else, to save space.

Linux server: has script to sync data drive to encrypted external drive. Run
manually because drive needs to be manually connected and password entered
(probably a way to work around this, but I'm lazy). I have 3 external drives
that are swapped about 1-2 weeks to work, and 1-4 months to another state.

It might seem too manual, but I have a workaround. I host a podcast[0] where I
say "don't forget that today is international backup awareness day[1], so
backup your stuff" to remind me.

0: [http://thenexus.tv/category/cs/](http://thenexus.tv/category/cs/)

1: [http://blog.codinghorror.com/international-backup-
awareness-...](http://blog.codinghorror.com/international-backup-awareness-
day/)

------
eldavido
Mozy for personal (non-prod) computers. it's like $60/year. Set and forget, my
computer was stolen last year, was up and running a day later, most of which
was spent purchasing the new computer (Macbook)

Prod is more complicated, my company works with several multi-TB data sets
(MongoDB) consisting of billions of swiftly changing kilobyte-sized documents.
This can't be "backed up" in the traditional sense because it's impossible,
barring custom hardware/great expense, to take a consistent snapshot of a
multi-TB dataset distributed across dozens of machines. So we do the usual
distributed replication across datacenters, put RAID underneath, etc. I worry
more about corruption due to application errors than losing a disk for this
stuff, though.

------
fapjacks
Automated. My stuff syncs automatically with Seafile (I used to use OwnCloud
but really highly recommend you not, since it eats files, and this is a known
problem there) every night when I get home. And every night in the middle of
the night, there's a cron on my home server that runs a partial, encrypted
backup to S3, and monthly full, encrypted backups. I have been bitten before,
and so something like this is extremely important.

On the business side, something similar, but nightlies and full weekly backups
to S3 of our private docker registry and Gitlab content.

Basically, if a fire or something (knock on wood) destroyed everything I
owned, including for some reason all the servers in all the datacenters, I
could be back up and running in a couple of hours, I think.

------
dewey
Automated:

Mac:

\- Arq (Highly recommended) to Google Drive (Unlimited) and Amazon Glacier

\- TimeMachine to two disks and a QNAP NAS

Servers:

\- Tarsnap

\- duplicity ([https://blog.notmyhostna.me/automated-and-encrypted-
backups-...](https://blog.notmyhostna.me/automated-and-encrypted-backups-with-
duplicity/))

------
bmaeser
on servers i run a couple of homebrew shell scripts to do backups. on some i
use the backup-gem
([https://github.com/backup/backup](https://github.com/backup/backup))

on my workstation/notebook (both apple computers) i use time machine with
different external harddrives i rotate weekly.

all setups run automated, but sometimes i trigger them manually (usually right
before and/or after some major change in configuration, or when lots of new
data are on the drives (eg: i copy all the holliday photos onto my laptop)

i run regular checks on server backups, e.g. check if they "are there" and if
i could restore them properly if needed.

------
ftio
Backblaze: backs up main hard drive automatically

Arq: backs up photo library to S3 Glacier automatically

Carbon Copy Cloner: clones main hard drive to external once every two weeks
and photo library to external (stored at parents' house) once every month

------
oxplot
I use rsyncbtrfs [1] (which I'm also the author of) to auto backup my OS, home
and pretty much everything, daily. It's saved my ass on numerous occasions
where I've deleted a file by mistake and could go back to the previous night's
backup to restore it. Backup is where btrfs really shines. I have some 1200
timestamped directories, each of which represent a snapshot of my data at a
certain date. I can just cd into them and look at the files.

[1]:
[https://github.com/oxplot/rsyncbtrfs](https://github.com/oxplot/rsyncbtrfs)

------
mahyarm
I use BitTorrent sync to sync smaller devices with a home desktop computer.
The desktop computer has read only access to the smaller devices to keep it
one way. The desktop computer has a windows storage pool in a raid 1 style
configuration. Then that syncs with backblaze so I have an offsite backup.
This setup doesn't deal with bitrot properly, and my large photo collection
doesn't fit well with it either, so it's still a work in progress.

I'm thinking maybe doing something with camlistore, and eventually taking
advantage of the 'unlimited' storage you get with onedrive.

------
derekp7
I wrote my own backup system, called Snebu
([http://www.snebu.com](http://www.snebu.com) hosted on github at
[http://www.github.com/derekp7/snebu](http://www.github.com/derekp7/snebu)).

It works a lot like rsnapshot, but uses an sqlite3 DB for metadata storage and
also does streaming compression (and encryption filter module is also coming
soon). Client side resources are light -- just requires a system with gnu tar
and gnu find, along with a bash shell for running the client-side script.

------
karlshea
Automated.

Macs: Time Machine to a NAS, plus Backblaze.

Windows: Genie (which sort of sucks performance-wise but all of the backup
solutions on Windows seem to be terrible. I miss the built-in one from Windows
7.) to NAS, plus Backblaze.

Linux: rdiff-backup to NAS.

Servers: Linode backup.

~~~
phaer
I don't use Windows, but often found
[https://www.bvckup2.com/](https://www.bvckup2.com/) quite satisfying when I
set up backups for Windows users among friends & family.

~~~
karlshea
Thanks! Looks really slick, I'm giving it a try. It's too bad there's no
snapshots or restore/recovery but that's probably fine, with Windows those end
up being pretty flakey anyways.

------
mburst
I'm currently on Heroku so my code is all in git and Heroku provides free
automated backups for Postgres. I'm eventually moving everything over to
Digital Ocean though. In which case I'll probably have a bash script that runs
on cron job to just rotate backups. Something like
[https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Automated_Backup_on_Linux](https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Automated_Backup_on_Linux)

I don't have massive amounts of important data to manage though so a simple
solution like this is all I need.

------
mindcruzer
Manual: Every now and then I run an rsync script to backup my stuff to an
external drive.

Automated: I have SpiderOak set up the auto backup select folders. I have
about 1 TB of offline storage for $12/month.

------
SippinLean
Crashplan. Automatic incremental backups to local and the cloud.

------
skbnut
We set ours up for daily backups for all our employees. We set it to only use
25% of their bandwidth and it just runs in the background, invisibly to the
end-user.

If there is a problem running the backup (three consecutive days missed), they
get an automated email letting them know. And IT also gets notified, so we can
reach out to the end user proactively to solve the problem.

Having automated backups has saved our bacon on more than one occasion!

Rich BakerRisk

------
chmielewski
A script to open/mount an encrypted external hard drive, an rsnapshot script
to do the deed, a third script to close/unmount the external drive. Run every
three days our so. There's a fourth script to mirror to a second external
drive, run every two weeks. Overall, it's three one-word aliases, one password
input and a cron job.

------
krupan
jwz backup:

[http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html](http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html)

I have a script that makes this a little more complicated and gives me
incremental backups:

[https://github.com/krupan/incremental_backup](https://github.com/krupan/incremental_backup)

------
lwhalen
Automated. Cron job on the ownCloud box, shipping PGP-encrypted backup nuggets
to S3 via Duplicity. Gentle reminder for everyone here - TEST YOUR RESTORES!
Nobody gives a rats about backups, they only care about restores.

[http://www.taobackup.com/](http://www.taobackup.com/)

------
hiamnew
Since Attic is fast and duplicating I do hourly backups via cron at work. At
the end of the day I prune them all and do a daily backup via systemd on
shutdown. For offsite I manually sync via usb stick and unison, merge at home
where daily backups are done as well. Rarely I update a backup hd stored at my
parents.

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alkonaut
crashplan. Easy to set up and forget. Unlimited storage with history. Cheap
family plan for 10 computers means I don't worry about rescuing my mother in
law from a ransom trojan. Really happy about not having to fiddle with any
custom setup like I did before.

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daw___
I use a shell script which I call with a keyboard shortcut at the end of the
day and does the following:

\- rsync-based backup of a sub-home directory where I keep sources, documents,
and other things I want to be saved in case of disaster

\- backup of all Trello cards via a custom python script

\- machine shutdown

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eps
Automated. Hourly to two separate USB drives, nightly to NAS, both with the
superb [https://bvckup2.com](https://bvckup2.com). The drives go to the bank
safe when leaving for the long trips.

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centizen
Personally, I use Macrium Reflect incremental backups on my Windows machines,
Time Machine on my MacBook and tar scripts on linux. These are copied to a NAS
which is further synced with Dropbox.

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josefresco
Automated

Backblaze for persistent cloud backup.

Semi-Manual (I need to dock my latptop and plug in the drives)

Weekly copy to external HDs (at home) using SyncBack

Manual

I backup by hand my FileZilla profiles, Google Docs, project management web
app (XML file).

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ef4
Syncthing to synchronize everything between the laptops and two storage
servers (one local, one remote).

Bup to snapshot the synchronized files every 5 minutes.

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jpetersonmn
I've been meaning to setup a backup plan for like the last 20 years. Maybe
over the Memorial Day weekend.

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Seetha08
Automated. Fully scheduled and users will not required to worry backup will
done in background Seetha

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lectrick
Time Machine, plus Arq (which backs up to amazon S3 glacier storage).

~~~
tfe
Same, except I recently added Google's new Glacier competitor (forgot the
name) for additional redundancy.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> Google's new Glacier competitor

Near line storage.
([https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/nearline](https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/nearline))

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avinassh
Automated.

I have Raspberry Pi, running always. And I use it as Time Capsule.

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dcgoss
Clone copy with SuperDuper whenever I remember.

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true_religion
Automated.

