
Ask HN: Where do you store your backups? - arcatek
My personal server hard drive crashed &amp; burned a few days ago and, of course, I had no backup. Fortunately, nothing valuable was lost in the process, but still.<p>Anyway, I&#x27;m now working on improving my backup &amp; restore strategy to avoid this kind of thing in the future, hence my question: where do you keep your backups? On physical hard drives? Dropbox&#x2F;Drive? Simple mail attachments?<p>Thanks,
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epc
I use Apple's Time Machine for routine day-to-day backups of our household
laptops. Periodically I take a bootable snapshot of each laptop using
SuperDuper.

We have a separate encrypted data volume that has tax records, documents,
photos, and other household media dating back to the 1980s which I back up
nightly to Amazon S3 using Arq.

I also keep two physical copies of the data volume, one in our house, a second
in a storage locker, which I sync up semi–manually. Same for music + video but
I don't back those up online.

I briefly used recordable DVDs but found that the ink faded too quickly,
regardless of alleged quality of the DVD. This became moot as disk prices
dropped over the past decade.

As larger SSDs become available I'm thinking of migrating to them for archival
purposes but don't know enough about how SSDs age to trust that entirely.

I keep multiple copies of the encryption keys in our household safe and a safe
deposit box.

1) [http://www.shirt-
pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription...](http://www.shirt-
pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html)

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

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gradschool
I use ZFS running on a local file server with weekly snapshots, and also
upload a selection of the most important stuff to an S3 bucket. (I recommend
encrypting it before uploading it including metadata.) Redundant self healing
file systems have been a thing for a while. Try a cluster of smaller drives to
replace your old one. Replacing a crashed disk should be only a minor
annoyance rather than a disaster.

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selectnull
I upload them to Google Cloud Storage.

