
Today is World Backup Day - pinwale
http://www.worldbackupday.com
======
chroma
If you're patting yourself on the back for already having backups, do as the
site says and practice restoring! It is a common mistake to set up backups but
never test that they actually can be restored.

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budmang
I'd like to make one small plug for <http://www.Backblaze.com>

We're an online backup service that provides completely unlimited storage,
external drive backup, versioning, etc. for $5/month. (And we're the
Presenting Sponsor of World Backup Day.) We also open sourced our 135 TB
Storage Pod for anyone to use.

If you're not backing up - please start! (Using us or something.) If you are,
please help your family and friends who almost certainly are not.

~~~
aMoniker
Backblaze looks like a great service, but like other cloud-based backup
services, it does not store "your operating system, applications, and
temporary files."

Out of curiosity, why is this? Are there copyright issues involved?

~~~
budmang
We don't store your operating system or apps primarily because without taking
a complete disk image, you wouldn't be able to reinstall them typically
anyway. Thus, it would take more of your bandwidth to get the files backed up,
but you wouldn't be able to use them. (And you may get a false sense of
security about them.) In general, our goal is to backup your data - the things
you can't get back.

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wazoox
Under Linux, rdiff-backup is a must. I use it to maintains incremental backups
since... ages. Under Mac OS, Time Machine does about the same (with a gui).
rdiff-backup works on windows too, but Cobian Backup is good enough and free
if you want a GUI.

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jannes
What backup software do you recommend? I just want to keep my external hard
drive in sync, but at the moment I have to do that manually. (I'm using
Windows, and I'm trying to avoid having to use cygwin, so rsync is not really
an option)

~~~
peterhajas
If that's all you want, I'm sure you can find a Windows equivalent to dd to
run every day. Do a direct bit copy, and then your external disk will always
be in sync with your internal disk.

~~~
mindslight
That's a terrible idea. Backing up with disk images will take a long time,
erase your previous backup at the start, and not prevent against filesystem
corruption.

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ShardPhoenix
Backing up in the sense of maintaining a full copy of your harddisk seems
increasingly unnecessary these days. Most of the stuff I would care about
losing is effectively already backed up on Github, webmail, Facebook, Steam,
etc.

~~~
JoshTriplett
I don't think that counts as "backed up". Personally, I always try to make
sure I have a mirrored copy of any of my data that I store with a third party,
unless I feel comfortable with that data vanishing without warning.

~~~
huhtenberg
He's got the point though that only one's _data_ needs to be backed up, not
every single bit on the disk.

~~~
scraplab
That depends what you're trying to achieve. With a full disk clone you can
lose a drive and be back up and running in minutes.

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gaiusparx
I use some of this advice: [http://sanziro.com/2011/01/practical-guide-for-
data-backup-o...](http://sanziro.com/2011/01/practical-guide-for-data-backup-
on-the-mac.html)

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sbenja
Backblaze is the easiet backup out there. I don't have to tell it what to back
up - it just knows. I don't know of any other backup that can do that. So, I
definitely recommend Backblaze.

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jrgifford
Well, pinwale! It has been a long time. Nice to see that you're A. still
alive, B. still doing awesome things like this. Keep up the good work!

~~~
pinwale
Yeah, it has been awhile since the last Ubuntu release. Still thinking if we
should do anything for the next ubuntu release.

~~~
jrgifford
If you're going to, hit me up for managing your IRC channel or anything else
like that. :)

~~~
pinwale
Thanks, I'll keep you in mind. :)

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tjoff
I'd love to take more backups, but is there a decent backup software (paid or
free) for Windows? I have my doubts...

While I use the Win7 backup system on my WS it does make me feel a bit uneasy,
I feel I have no control over it whatsoever. It doesn't do incremental
backups. I have no say in how long they should be stored, the backups are
stored in a weird way with hundreds of zip-files and I've found no easy way to
browse them or restore just a lost file and I haven't even dared to use the
restore options because I feel like I'm going to blow something up (so maybe
you can do that, but the UI is just _bad_ ). Also I get no report that a
backup was successful or if it has failed and I can't tell it to delete _old_
backups).

I've used Acronis True Image before and I really wanted to like it but... I
used it to, among other things, back up some network drives. All was fine and
I got confirmation that everything was fine every week, but one day I skimmed
through the logs and found out that the network drives hadn't been backed up
but Acronis still said that the whole operation was a success. I can't even
begin to comprehend the absolute lunacy about ignoring some failures in a
backup program. Maybe they've fixed this now but they have a long way to
restore my trust.

Also when doing incremental backups you can not anywhere state that I wan't a
complete backup after x incremental backups. You have to manually move the old
backups to force it to do a complete backup again, and it won't delete backups
older than x months/years so you have to manually clean up or else your
backups will constantly increase for all eternity. This should be about the
third or fourth feature you implement in a backup program and all it would
take is like 10 lines of code and a checkbox.

So, still having a hard time to see how one couldn't be better than Acronis I
stumbled upon EaseUS Todo Backup Workstation but you can't do incremental
backups of your OS (seriously?), so I've resorted to doing incremental
partition images but I'm mighty unimpressed by the GUI and I don't feel safe
at all.

Seriously guys, this shouldn't be hard! I just want incremental backups of my
OS (but a complete backup after x incremental backups and auto-delete after
say 2 years), easy to do a complete restore or just browse old files and a
working reporting system (even mail will be enough, just don't say everything
is fine when it isn't). I can't imagine something being more simple than those
basic needs and I've yet to find anything decent.

It would be nice to be able to take a daily backup for the last x days and
then only keep one for every week for y weeks and then only keep one for every
month for z months but I have completely given up my hope of finding something
"advanced" enough to handle something like that.

~~~
Swizec
I think this is one of those problems where it looks like a weekend, a week at
most, job ... until you actually start implementing it.

That said, I would also love a backup system like what you describe. If it
could also detect imminent HDD failure (say, the first bad sector pops up) and
warn me that I need to backup my backups _NOW_. That would be splendid.

Furthermore, I don't really have anything to back up. Everything I actually
need is stored on git/github, everything else is downloadable via torrents.

~~~
tjoff
I surely have respect for the problem of making a backup securely while the
system is running, but this is of course something that all backup vendors
have had to do regardless of their featureset. Or they could just use the
inbuilt service from Microsoft and be done (
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy> , right?). It should be a solved
problem by now.

But there is no excuse in having a poor UI or neglecting important aspects of
backups. I've _always_ have had the feeling that "no one that developed this
tool has _ever_ used it for themselves for other than testing purposes". None
of them I've tried have the _option_ of deleting backups that are old
automatically and _everyone_ that has ever used a backup program will think of
this when, after a year, their backups are getting somewhat big. It's so
obvious it hurts my soul, and I'm about to trust them with my data? And
perhaps even pay them to handle my data?

Just compare with all the numerous rsync scripts people do. Automatic deletion
is among the first features you implement. And that isn't a weekend project,
that is a coffee-break project.

In Microsofts backup tool you can get a list of old backups in order to delete
one if you like, the list in which they list your backups isn't even sorted -
not by date or size, just random (with no way to sort it). They have put no
effort in it at all (I first thought that the backups for a few months was
missing), the attention to detail (in all the software I've tried) is just
nonexistent.

~~~
Swizec
The issue with big backups isn't that these people aren't using their own
software, it's that they are big companies who consider disk space to be
essentially free.

Why would you delete possibly old data if you are so rich the price of keeping
infinite amounts of data doesn't even register? (or is less than the cost of
losing data)

~~~
nuxi
I don't completely agree, but I work in storage so I'm also a bit biased.

First of all, even though the disk prices may be getting lower and lower, the
amount of data being backed up is growing (almost?) exponentially. This not
only requires a lot of space, it's also getting more difficult to back up in a
certain amount of time (you probably want your full backups to finish before
starting incrementals). There are various workarounds for these issues
(compression, snapshots, deduplication etc.), but none of them have really
solved them yet.

Secondly, the disks used for backups are usually part of disk arrays and those
are quite expensive and also require some administration.

Thirdly, disks are only one part of the story - tapes are not dead yet and
probably won't be for a while. They are usually faster than disks (when
streaming speed is achieved), cheaper per TB of storage, can be stored more
efficiently etc. There are drawbacks of course, so bigger companies usually
create multi-tiered backup systems combining all available solutions.

As for the deletion of old data - some data has to be archived/available for a
long time in order to e.g. comply with certain laws, but in general one
implements multiple retention policies, depending on the importance of data.
Most likely you wouldn't want to store _everything_, not just because of the
space needed, but also because you need to somehow catalog what is being
backed up and this also requires substantial resources.

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stephengoodwin
Should we really suggest to people backing up using anything but remote
backups?

~~~
huhtenberg
How can you sincerely suggest remote backups if virtually none of them provide
privacy provisions? If anything, people should be _discouraged_ from using
remote backups that are not encrypted at source.

~~~
kijin
Virtually none of them? SpiderOak, Wuala, JungleDisk.

~~~
budmang
Agreed that backing up only in transit can be sketchy. Most online backup
services (including ours, www.Backblaze.com) encrypt your data on your client.
Also, we provide an option to use a private key in which case not only is it
encrypted, but only you have the key. Of course, if you forget it the data is
completely unrecoverable.

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ohm
Super Flexible File Synchronizer and SyncToy are great programs for backup.

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njharman
This is an April's Fools joke, right?

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seanp2k2
>"Today is World Backup Day "

Oops, looks like I forgot

\ _slow grin\_

~~~
budmang
You...and 94% of everybody else I'm afraid:
[http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/12/94-of-computer-users-
st...](http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/12/94-of-computer-users-still-risk-
data-loss/)

