

Ask HN: How do you Backup your Personal Files? - davidbrent

Call me a child of the American media's fear tactics, but this well publicized story of Matt Honan's hack has me questioning my backup techniques of personal files (pictures, music, important family legal docs, tax data, etc...).<p>Currently I have one hard drive on my home Windows 7 desktop machine, with dropbox sync setup to mirror certain folders and then I use Google Drive for most of my pictures and media sorts.  Now I am thinking I need a local option, something fully under my control (and unfortunately my responsibility).<p>With so many options out there, I wanted to see what the users of Hacker News were doing with their personal files, outside of the plethora of cloud solutions.  Thanks!
======
elektronaut
First line of defense is a Time Machine backup to a 1TB drive connected to an
Airport Extreme. No-brainer if you're on a Mac, in my opinion. Tip: excluding
my Chrome profile from the backups reduced the size of most backups by an
order of magnitude.

Second, CrashPlan. It's the only decent solution I could find with support for
backing up network drives without being prohibitively expensive for large
amounts of data. The client is a bit resource hungry, but I'm hoping the
situation will improve as soon as the first run is complete.

I also have a Dropbox account which I mainly use for syncing and sharing, but
I've included the most important files there as well for extra redundancy and
ease of access on other devices.

In addition, all my code is pushed to at least one remote repository, either
on Github or a server. I also run my own mail server which is rsynced to
another server, so there's at least three separate copies of my mail folders.

~~~
joelrunyon
I tried crashplan on my macbook air. The big thing I'm noticing right now is
it takes freaking forever to do the initial backup. I'm really hoping that
subsequent backups don't take nearly as long.

~~~
yoda_sl
The initial backup can be long yes... I usually leave my Mac always ON for a
couple days when that initial backup is happening. After that first backup is
done all the others are incremental and usually fast... Unless of course you
just created a multi gigabytes movies that need backup.

------
nileshk
I have multiple layers of redundancy. This is Mac-centric, but you can do
something similar in other operating systems:

* I use a Time Machine to do incremental backups of my system drive which also contains any files that I don't want to lose.

* I periodically make a complete image of all my important drives. I have two copies of this. One copy stays off-site and I never have both at the same location as my originals. The other copy is local but left disconnected. I periodically rotate a copy to the off-site location. I use SuperDuper to make the images.

* I use DropBox for things I am working on and various other important files I want backed up and shared across my computers. This isn't big enough to contain the bulk of my media files (music, photos, video), but anything small enough goes here. A few of my super-important media files I keep here, like my wedding video and photos. I started using DropBox's photo syncing feature for my phone camera and am thinking of using it for all my cameras as well.

* Anything in my DropBox gets backed up by Time Machine as well on two different computers at two different locations.

I think it's really important to have at least two backups in the case that
one of them fails. And one of them absolutely should be off site since a
burglary, fire, hurricane, etc can potentially take them all out if they are
all in the same location.

Also, it should not be possible for a remote attacker to erase all of your
backups. For example, if you used a combination of Time Machine and cloud
backup, an attacker could potentially gain access to your local machine, do a
secure erase of all your drives including your Time Machine backup, and gain
access to your online cloud backup and erase that. In a situation like that,
you better hope that your cloud backup provider keeps enough backups such that
you can recover erased files.

If you want to be even safer it's good to have 3 backups. One local, one off-
site, and one off-site in a different city (e.g. Internet backup or shipping
your drives somewhere). Now this is considering a severe worse case scenario,
but having an off-site backup in the same city isn't enough, because a
hurricane or earthquake could potentially damage your drives in both
locations.

~~~
typicalrunt
I have a similar backup system as this, but I temper my use of DropBox for
super important things because it is a hot storage solution. If I (or someone)
happens to delete it from one DropBox location, it's deleted everywhere.

For that reason, I also SFTP my files up to Amazon S3 as a cold storage
solution.

------
fooandbarify
I know you are looking for a non-cloud option, but Tarsnap (an excellent
service by HN's cperciva - <http://www.tarsnap.com/>) is impervious to the
sort of issues raised by Matt Honan's hack, as long as you properly secure
your private keys. Of course it is still susceptible to the other weaknesses
presented by the cloud, which is why I also use an rsync'd external drive.

~~~
icebraining
Same here. Tarsnap + external drive, with the occasional burning of DVDs for
Very Important Files™(with parity data).

------
philh
I have a 1TB external drive, and occasionally plug it in and run a script that
calls `rdiff-backup --exclude-other-filesystems foo /mnt/backup/bar` for
multiple values of foo and bar.

It's not complete enough that I could wipe my root partition, restore the
backup and start running again, but I'm not going to lose anything important
if my laptop gets stolen.

I don't use cloud backups, mostly out of laziness. (I would have to think
about what is actually worth backing up, and organise things so that it's easy
to back those things up and not other things.)

------
thraxil
I run a Tahoe-LAFS grid that spans a couple drives in my home machine and my
office workstation. The majority of "archival" stuff I need to store that's
large and relatively infrequently accessed (music, ripped DVD backups, hi-res
TIFF scans of my artwork, RAW files for my photography) just lives in that
grid. "Backups" are implicit. I even wrote my own music player that just
streams out of Tahoe instead of off disk.

I actually had a (mostly full) 2TB drive go south just the other week and I
was able to pull it out and replace it without any data loss. The rest of the
grid was even still available while I replaced the drive. I put a new drive
in, made a new Tahoe node on it, brought that node into the grid, then ran a
"tahoe deep-check --repair" and it repaired and rebalanced all the files that
had had shares on the broken drive.

My source code is vitally important, but small. I use git so I just always
maintain a couple repos. Generally one on my workstation, one on our office
git server, one on github, and there might be copies on my laptop, home
machine, and a personal Rackspace server.

For my personal websites, I have a cron job that dumps data out nightly and
drops it into Tahoe.

------
organico
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this... I don't trust Drobo/Synology
etc because if the unit dies I need another one to retrieve my data.
Jungledisk adds up if you have 100+GB, Backblaze is the best of these
services, however they are proprietary, and imagine if either were cracked and
your life ended up on on a torrent server somewhere... In the end I decided
upon a HP Microserver running Ubuntu with disks in RAID5 + a cheap UPS. I then
have an rsync cronjob on my laptop. I tried FreeNAS but it was slow. I may
consider an offsite backup of the Ubuntu server (critical files (photos etc))
to AWS with Duplicity and PGP... So far I feel the safest and happiest I've
been in awhile about my backup situation.

------
steve8918
I have a 6-drive Netgear ReadyNAS Probusiness that is currently at about 3TB.
It supports Time Machine, so I backup my 2 Mac Laptops through Time Machine
only. I backup my desktops and all my other files on the ReadyNAS. I have UPS
on all my desktops and ReadyNAS to prevent any power outages from causing data
corruption. This came in handy a few months ago when a tree branch fell and
took out my power lines.

I have two 2TB drives that I switch between every couple of months that I
backup my ReadyNAS to. Because this data is basically my entire digital life
(my photos, documents going back to about 1993, emails, etc), I don't trust a
straight file copy, so I wrote my own simple bit-by-bit file comparison
program. An engineer at NetApp told me all the horror stories that he's been
involved with in terms of hard drive reliability, including things like the
hard drive reporting to the OS that it wrote everything correctly, when it
fact it didn't, so I've become pretty paranoid. The last thing I want is to
make a backup, and then find that what was written on my backup hard drive was
corrupt.

I have a couple of 500GB hard drives that contain some older archived data
from 3+ years ago, so my older photos and documents have about 4 different
copies. The only thing I don't implement, which is probably my biggest
weakness, is that I don't store any copies offsite, so if there's a fire, I'm
screwed.

Except for database and photos, my data growth has slowed down considerably. I
would guess that my database data grows about 100 GB every year (I collect
stock quotes every day), and my photos and videos are, on average, 10-20GB.
This year was an anomaly because I went on a road trip where I used 2 GoPros
to take time lapse photos and videos of the entire road trip, and that data
itself is about 100 GB, and 99% of it is useless (and embarrassing).

------
redacted
Multiple backups. Redundancy is the name of the game (redundancy and
paranoia)!

1) Backblaze - fire-and-forget cloud backup, running in the background
[constant]

2) Time Machine drive - what if I have no network access and need to recover
work? [daily, when I'm at my desk]

3) Carbon Copy Cloner - what if I suffer a catastrophic boot disk failure?
[weekly]

The drives for Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner are in separate
geographical locations (fire, theft, etc).

CCC creates bootable backups, so if my internal SSD drive dies I can boot from
USB or just switch the drive out, then restore any changes from TM. Minimal
downtime!

------
veyron
I've had certain personal data wiped from a hard drive many years ago, so I am
a bit paranoid:

USB Thumb Drive for active files, 2 copies on External Hard Drives for long
term storage (which I migrate once a year to new drives), and two physical
copies of critical documents (legal, tax) kept in two locations (usually my
parents house and a safe deposit box).

------
DanBC
I have some items that I would not like to lose - photographs of my son.

These are copied to multiple machines, in different houses. They are uploaded
to 2 different providers (facebook (natch) and dropbox.)

I also create rars with par2 redundancy data and burn them to good quality CDs
which are stored in tyvek sleeves in a firesafe.

That's perhaps a bit over the top, but I really don't want to lose those
photos.

Passwords and serial numbers are printed out and kept in the firesafe. That's
perhaps a bit insecure, and I need to arrange an "in case of death" list.

Everything else used to be rsynced to a different machine in the same house,
but now it's time machined.

~~~
steve8918
A firesafe is a great idea, and I might follow your example. Do you know if
the temperature inside the firesafe remains low enough so that things like CDs
and hard drives don't get corrupt? I know that they work for things like
papers, but are they deemed safe enough for electronics?

------
de_dave
Hourly remote-initiated rsnapshot to MyBook Live NAS on internal network.

Then the NAS performs a nightly sync of selected folders from the latest
hourly backup with tarsnap, keeping backups from the last 7 days, last 4 weeks
and last 3 months.

------
tjic
I have a cheap box at a webhosting company with ssh access.

I use svn over ssh and check in all of my person stuff there.

This is really nice because I can share linux dotfiles, etc. between my work
and home machines.

------
creature
I'm a Linux user. I have a laptop that's my main machine and a fileserver for
storage. I try not to keep anything on the laptop, but have my programming
projects & config files on it (so I can work if I'm away from home).

The fileserver is where most of my stuff lives; it gets NFS mounted to the
laptop. It's got two drives as RAID1, and backs itself up to an external hard
drive using rdiff-backup. It also backs itself up offsite using duplicity to a
server on another continent. Everything's encrypted, so if anything gets
stolen I only have to worry about the material loss.

------
aaronpk
Dropbox syncing to 3 machines, one of which is a linux server in my closet.
The linux server makes snapshots of the folder and saves rolling daily, weekly
and monthly snapshots to a RAID1 array. (see
[http://neverusethisfont.com/blog/2010/07/how-to-back-up-
drop...](http://neverusethisfont.com/blog/2010/07/how-to-back-up-dropbox-
automatically-daily-weekly-monthly-snapshots/)) The RAID1 array is then backed
up to a separate RAID1 array nightly.

Thia has been working pretty well for me and is a good balance between
automation and sufficient redundancy.

------
gcv
Arq backup works great. It does encrypted incremental snapshot backups to your
personal S3 account (unlike most services which hold your backups hostage). It
has an open-source recovery program. It has a documented format.

For local backups, I use a poor-man's Time Machine — rsync with hard links.
It's how Time Machine works under the hood anyway, and I used it long before
Apple baked it into the OS. Works great.

The OP uses Windows, though, so I honestly have no idea what equivalents to
these options exist which would work with, e.g., NTFS.

~~~
13rules
Mark me down as another vote for Arq ... total set it and forget it setup.
Very easy to use and inexpensive option for offsite backups.

------
magic5227
Just be careful those of you using sync too much, I've definitely seen people
sync across deletes and other errors.

I personally backup about 1tb of home movies, photos, music etc. I keep 1
local HD + crashplan + crashplan remote in a friends house + Google Drive for
docs I use daily. I also keep an offline drive just in case an error is
replicated across my live drives.

I also used to use BackBlaze but dropped them, they play tricks to get out of
storing a lot of content for too long

~~~
redacted
Can you expand on the 'Backblaze plays tricks' comment? I am current user and
am curious.

------
pigboy
I'm finding I generate very few "personal files" these days, compared with,
say, ten years ago. Most personal files are produced/archived with Google
Docs.

Yes, that is scary.

I also have 100 GB or so of archived photographs and videos that I back up
with a mixture of Ubuntu One (videos and assorted files from 10 years ago) and
Rackspace Cloudfiles (photos). I wrote my own Python scripts for backing up
and verifying photos on Cloudfiles.

~~~
devb0x
I've also been working on less files locally. Everything is sitting in Google
docs. Or worse, I've mailed it to gmail and it sits there unread.

I rsync between my two nix boxes. My wife's Win box I do every now and again,
mostly video and pictures.

Drop box for scripts I need across the nix boxes.

And I do a manual copy to an external, my folder structure is the same on all
boxes but I like to watch this one.

------
rodolphoarruda
At the end of each day I run this Allway Sync app that makes both two way and
one-way syncs of my folders to an external 320GB Samsung HDD. I don't
propagate deletions for my photos and videos, so they accumulate forever. For
all the other folders, I propagate deletions and modifications. Every couple
of months or so I mirror this daily use external HDD with another one I have
just to avoid any risk involving hardware failure.

------
andrewmin
I know this is controversial in light of their recent breach, but I use
Dropbox in conjunction with a symlink into my docs folder. I don't have photos
or videos, and my documents easily fit into Dropbox (I also have a lot of
bonus space, from Dropquests, job fairs, and referrals). Everything
automatically backs up, is accessible from any device, has revision history,
and won't get destroyed if my house burns down.

------
aleprok
Personally I have been very lazy with backups, but I take important documents
to usb stick which I carry with my keys everywhere I go.

Though I should probably start backing up my personal hobby projects, because
I have lost ton of them over the years, because I just kept one working copy
of them, but I have been lazy to great a backup plan which I would actually
follow.

------
pitzips
\- Dropbox for documents and archived log files.

\- Photos and videos are backed up to a truecrypt drive manually using
FreeFileSync twice a week or so.

\- Backblaze running constantly.

\- Pogoplug (+1 external drive attached) offsite at my parents house with
archlinux installed. Eventually I'll attach another drive and have rsync
mirroring them using a cron job.

------
samoli
1 TB Time Capsule for my most regular main backup (2 mac laptops) iCloud
backup for iPhone and iPad (upgraded storage) Arq backup direct to s3 for
really important stuff like photos (<http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/>). I
have about 200GB on reduced redundancy storage.

------
dibarra
Rsync cron to my RAID 6 NAS box. Photos get sync'd to 3rd party service.
Thumbdrive for critical passwords (keepass).

------
jfb
I live exclusively in the Apple ecosystem, so I:

    
    
      1. back my Mac up with Time Machine;
    
      2. do a weekly Carbon Copy Cloner dd of my disk;
    
      3. keep copies of my data (documents, music, photos) on Dropbox.
    

iCloud handles syncing. This is not bulletproof, but it works for me.

------
skram
My first line of defense: Dropbox

I also have CrashPlan running in the background but hardly ever have to use it

I have an Apple Time Capsule as well but, like CrashPlan, I try not to have to
use it and it's more of a worst case scenario backup.

Dropbox all the way.

------
mhenr18
I just keep everything I care about in my Dropbox. I use enough machines on a
day-to-day basis that this leaves me with a decent local redundancy, and
having it all on Dropbox means that I'll have access to it even if all of my
machines go down at once.

~~~
andrewaylett
I fear Dropbox may be more like RAID than like backup: what happens when a
file is deleted, causing it to be removed from all of your redundant machines?

~~~
lotsofpulp
You have 30 days to recover it using the free version, and unlimited time if
you pay for it: <https://www.dropbox.com/help/115/en>

------
tjosten
Apple Time Machine and two external 2 TB hard drives for the iMac.
Additionally, a daily backup backup of my Macbook Air to a 128 GB USB flash
drive, which I copy over to the external hard drives once a week.

~~~
EdwardCoffin
Mine is similar: Time Machine all the time, and a periodic drive image using
Super Duper to one of two external (actually enclosure-less internal) drives,
one of which is always offsite.

------
rickmode
Time Machine via a drive hooked to an Airport Extreme along with Backblaze.

------
crazygringo
CrashPlan.

Maybe this post should be converted to a poll, though?

------
dangravell
BackupPC handles all computers. Then...

Photos and documents (basically small stuff) -> rsync.net every day.

Large stuff (music, video) -> external USB disk.

------
webwanderings
1TB Touro Mobile USB, always sitting on top of my desktop. I just have to do a
manual backup every so often using Sync Toy.

I also use Dropbox etc free.

------
buzzmckinnon
I've been wrestling with this same issue, ever since I read Google's EULA. I'm
thinking of using Carbonite, which no one's mentioned yet.

------
sidmitra
* Crashplan, family plan that has unlimited backup for 5$/mnth

* Drobo FS for local backup, can go upto 5 HDDs as RAID.

------
pooriaazimi
OS X

Time Machine backup (daily) + bit-by-bit copy of hard disk using SuperDuper
(on another external drive).

------
josephagoss
Over 400GB backup on external and crashplan, these include all my personal
files and photos throughout my life.

------
forkrulassail
rsync to RAID 5 externals.

Crashplan running in background.

Google Drive for Docs and working files.

Github & other git services for projects.

------
hboon
Github + Dropbox + CrashPlan

------
jfaucett
rsync cronjob to my external 8TB :)

~~~
13rules
I don't know why the comment below this "What will you do if your house burns
down?" is marked as dead ... it's a very valid question.

Backing up onsite is almost as bad as no backup at all. You are protecting
against hardware failure ONLY.

If your house burns down you are screwed. Also, if someone breaks in and
steals your computer, do you think they aren't taking your external drives as
well?

Offsite backup is mandatory if you really care about not losing your data.

