What are your backing up data/computer strategies

[Sam]

What is your backup strategy?

For example, do you do incremental back ups regularly or just do one
full backup every week or so? Do you have more than one partition or
hard drive you use and if you have file corruption or other issues you
reformat or recover your image? What back up program do use and what
system?

 

[Rod Speed]

Sam wrote

What is your backup strategy?

Varys with the circumstances. When writing code etc I backup
the code being changed every hour to two, and do that manually,
basically when I have done something major etc.

When making a change to an app I always back it up before changing anything.

When working on someone else's system, I normally do a full
backup before doing anything when its got a serious problem.

I also do that with a clean reinstall, basically so I can restore
the image when manually moving the setttings etc to the new
install when nothing else is feasible because its too ****ed etc.

For example, do you do incremental back ups regularly
Yes.

or just do one full backup every week or so?
Nope.

Do you have more than one partition or hard drive you use

Yes, more than one hard drive, in fact do the backups between different physical systems.

and if you have file corruption or other issues you reformat or recover your image?

Thats only a last resort. I just dont get file corruption at all.

When the OS goes pear shaped, I normally use a restore
point and will only do a full restore if that doesnt work etc.

What back up program do use

Acronis True Image.

and what system?

That varys with the particular machine and the circumstances.

 

[DevilsPGD]

In message <[email protected]> someone claiming

What is your backup strategy?

For example, do you do incremental back ups regularly or just do one
full backup every week or so? Do you have more than one partition or
hard drive you use and if you have file corruption or other issues you
reformat or recover your image? What back up program do use and what
system?

Personally, I use Windows 7's system image capability to take a snapshot
every couple nights which is saved to another drive within my system to
allow me to restore from a single drive failure without investing in a
full RAID-1. This configuration is pushed out via group policy to all
systems with a second physical drive, and is primarily used to restore
the system if needed, not to restore data (although obviously either is
possible)

I have a pair of file servers that replicate in real time, we save
anything important directly to the file servers. For data that needs to
be local (my usenet client, for example), I use a synchronization script
(rsync based) to mirror all of my data to the file server.

Important data, primarily photos, purchased digital media, any content
we've created in-house, and basically anything of value that I would
want recovered after a catastrophic loss is snapshotted and stored
off-site in "the cloud", updating every 24 hours.

For us to lose anything important, it would either have to be
accidentally deleted and not noticed for at least 60 days, or there
would be a combined catastrophic loss on-site followed by a catastrophic
loss at our cloud provider (currently RackSpace's storage cloud)

 

[mscotgrove]

In message <[email protected]> someone claiming



Personally, I use Windows 7's system image capability to take a snapshot
every couple nights which is saved to another drive within my system to
allow me to restore from a single drive failure without investing in a
full RAID-1.  This configuration is pushed out via group policy to all
systems with a second physical drive, and is primarily used to restore
the system if needed, not to restore data (although obviously either is
possible)

I have a pair of file servers that replicate in real time, we save
anything important directly to the file servers.  For data that needs to
be local (my usenet client, for example), I use a synchronization script
(rsync based) to mirror all of my data to the file server.

Important data, primarily photos, purchased digital media, any content
we've created in-house, and basically anything of value that I would
want recovered after a catastrophic loss is snapshotted and stored
off-site in "the cloud", updating every 24 hours.

For us to lose anything important, it would either have to be
accidentally deleted and not noticed for at least 60 days, or there
would be a combined catastrophic loss on-site followed by a catastrophic
loss at our cloud provider (currently RackSpace's storage cloud)

Part of my backup system is an online, automatic backup program. There
are several and I am happy with Carbonite. In particular, it is
AUTOMATIC for the directories I have defined. This will not allow
full recovery of a system, but will allow recovery of all user files.

One advantage is that I use a licence on my travelling laptop. All
changes and new files are therefore backed up daily.

Some people have concerns about security of 'cloud' type backup -
these should be considered.

All files are stored elsewhere, and so safe from fire, theft,
lightening strike etc.

Other backups I use are disk images, stored on a RAID. It is however
local, and so subject to fire theft etc.

My guide line for backup is multiple copies in multiple locations,
done automatically. It avoids the problem I hear so often that 'I was
going to do a backup next week'.

Michael
www.cnwrecovery.com

 

[DevilsPGD]

In message
<[email protected]>

Some people have concerns about security of 'cloud' type backup -
these should be considered.

This is true, but it's also why encryption was invented.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

What is your backup strategy?

For example, do you do incremental back ups regularly or just do one
full backup every week or so? Do you have more than one partition or
hard drive you use and if you have file corruption or other issues you
reformat or recover your image? What back up program do use and what
system?

I'm using Macrium Reflect. I do one full bootdisk backup image at the
beginning of the month, and a weekly incremental of the same.

I also backup some non-bootdisk related data in a separate schedule, but
similar strategy (1 full at the beginning of the month, weekly
incrementals rest of the month).

I keep keep 2 full backups accessible. Older ones are automatically deleted.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Lynn McGuire]

What is your backup strategy?

For example, do you do incremental back ups regularly or just do one
full backup every week or so? Do you have more than one partition or
hard drive you use and if you have file corruption or other issues you
reformat or recover your image? What back up program do use and what
system?

I backup a small LAN of about 15 PCs and servers with about
650 GB of files. Three of the PCs have a separate drive (D
that I use for daily full backups. I do not believe in
incremental backups. Our LAN storage is growing at 10 to 20
GB per month. All of our PCs are some variant of Windows.

I also have seven external USB hard drives of 1 TB to 2 TB
that I backup the LAN to once per week in a rotation. That
way I have backups for each of the last six weeks at any
given time.

I use the Microsoft robocopy.exe program for backing up all
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy
the hard drives on the LAN. Some of the downsides of using
robocopy are:
1. does not backup open files
2. I choose not to delete files from the backup that have
been deleted just in case the deletion was an accident
3. the error reporting is bad
4. I have trouble backing up the c:\documents directory on
some of the Windows XP drives over the network so these
users run a daily script to copy their directories to one
of our file servers

My backup.bat script looks like:
mkdir logs
robocopy \\gui1\c gui1_c /s /e /v /r:0 /xj /log:logs\gui1_c.txt /tee
.... more robocopy commands ...
attrib -h -s gui1_c
.... more attrib commands ...
date /t
time /t
echo "" > lasttime

I execute this script each day as I leave for home.

I reformat the backup hard drives as they become full over
time. I also rotate one or more of the external drives
into long term storage per year.

Lynn

 

[Arno]

What is your backup strategy?

For example, do you do incremental back ups regularly or just do one
full backup every week or so? Do you have more than one partition or
hard drive you use and if you have file corruption or other issues you
reformat or recover your image? What back up program do use and what
system?

Everyting important in a version control system (svn), backed up
to a remote site nightly and residing on a 3-way RAID1.
For system backpus, about once per month to a rotation pair of
3TB USB drives.

Arno

 

[Ed Light]

I'm using bootitng partition and boot manager, and Image for DOS imager.

My system is on C: and data on F:, media on M:, images of C: on I:.

Whenever I'm going to make a change to the system I image it to I:, so
that if it doesn't work out, I can restore the image and have it the way
it was.

Once a month I use Sync Back Pro to mirror the images to an external HD
that I keep at home.

For the data, I really go nuts.

Firstly, I upload the changes to idrive.

Secondly, I use Version Backup, with encryption active, daily, to backup
changes (incremental) to the data and to my downloaded program files, to
a 32 Gig USB key which is always in my pocket. Once a month, I archive
the changes to a mobile external HD that I keep in a safe deposit box.
Then every few months I can make a full backup on the key and erase the
older stuff off it, since it's still in the bank.

I also use Sync Back Pro to backup multimedia and the like to that
external HD that I keep at home.

I think that covers it.

--
Ed Light

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[Ed Light]

I just had some serious restore issues with Version Backup, so can't
recommend it.
--
Ed Light

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[Arno]

Everyting important in a version control system (svn), backed up
to a remote site nightly and residing on a 3-way RAID1.
For system backpus, about once per month to a rotation pair of
3TB USB drives.

Arno

Forgot: For copying installations and for the backup-to-remote
I use rdiff-backup, which does inverse differential backups,
i.e. you have a directly accessible copy of the current state
(complete filesystem tree) and then reverse diffs to the older
versions. This has several advantages compared to the conventional
forward diffs. Also, rdiff-backup works both local and over the net,
stored checksums for every file and allows 3 verify modes:
Backup against checksums, original against checksums and
backup against original bitwiese (the last being slow over a
network obviously). This makes for easy access of you backup,
only older versions are a bit slower. The only downside is
that it does not compress, but I found it unnecessary.

I also have an automatized backup with rdiff-backup of my fileserver
system installation (not data) each week and one of my 3 vservers
to my fileservers each week for two of them and each night for
the one that is primary mail and webserver.


Arno

 

[Ed Light]

But whatever you decide, you want to be very sure that you can get the
data you want, or restore the system you want, in a reliable way. So
something that requires a specific program to restore your system is
usually a bad idea.

It used encrypted zip files and incremental backups.
I'm trying Backup4all USB now; it's using AES encryption in zip files.
Seems promising.

--
Ed Light

Better World News TV Channel:
http://realnews.com

Iraq Veterans Against the War and Related:
http://ivaw.org
http://couragetoresist.org
http://antiwar.com

Send spam to the FTC at
(e-mail address removed)
Thanks, robots.

 

[Rod Speed]

David Brown wrote

Ed Light wrote

This brings up a vital point when discussing backups - the most
important thing to consider is /restores/. A backup is just a waste
of time and space unless you are sure you can restore your data when
you want it.

I am not recommending any particular strategy here, since it depends
on what you want to protect (just data, or a complete installation?),
how well you want to protect it, what systems you want to protect,
how much time, effort and money you want to spend, what your skills
are, etc.

But whatever you decide, you want to be very sure that you can get the
data you want, or restore the system you want, in a reliable way. So
something that requires a specific program to restore your system is
usually a bad idea.

Thats just plain wrong. Its fine if that specific program is sure to be
available because you include it with the backup, or are sure it will
always be available when you need to do a restore.

If it requires specific hardware, it is probably a bad idea (at least for home or small users).

Depends on how readily available that specific harware is.

If it just requires a system that has USB, and all systems have that, its a complete yawn.

An all-or-nothing restore is also usually a bad solution (unless you combine it with other backups).

Thats just plain wrong too. It is the most reliable form of restore,
particularly for those who dont know much about systems.

Remember, the most common reason for needing something from backups is user error - you delete the wrong file.

Thats not true for everyone, particularly when using Win which
has other ways of dealing with that particular situation.

In such cases, you want to be able to read individual files or directories - a system based on complete system
restores is unlikely to be helpful here.

While theoretically true, there are very few modern backup apps that
dont allow the restore of an individual file from a full image backup.

At other times you want to do a complete restore - perhaps after some serious corruption or malware infection, or hard
disk problems.

And almost all modern backup systems allow you to do both.

 

[Sam]

So something that requires a specific program to restore your system is
usually a bad idea.

I think I have to agree with this, but aren't apps necessary to backup
and restore? I have had issues when trying to recover an image from
an older version of the app thinking that the new version was
backwards compatible. eg. Acronis 8, 11 vs 12. Fortunately, for me, I
was able to have the older app and install in a laptop and create a
recovery CD or USB to run the recovery program.

 

[Rod Speed]

Sam wrote

I think I have to agree with this,

I dont, for the reasons I already mentioned.

but aren't apps necessary to backup and restore?

Some backup apps keep the files as normal files, so you can restore
them any way you like, you dont have to use any particular app to do that.

Thats not practical with the most recent Win OS backups, but can work with others.

Its got other real downsides too.

I have had issues when trying to recover an image from
an older version of the app thinking that the new version
was backwards compatible. eg. Acronis 8, 11 vs 12.

And you can protect yourself against that by doing test restores.

Fortunately, for me, I was able to have the older app and install in a
laptop and create a recovery CD or USB to run the recovery program.

And you could have just kept the older recovery CD too.

 

[Ed Light]

One thing I used to do was use Nero Burning ROM to backup my data files
to DVD-R or +R. It has options to do multisessions where each one is
incremental -- add new files, change changed ones, and hide deleted
ones. If you look at the disk in Win Explorer you just see how the data
was after the last burn. But if you use a session explorer such as
isobuster, then when you're looking at a specific session (I name them
in Nero with the date), you are looking at the data as it was on that
day, and you can restore it.

Worked just great. But it wasn't encrypted.
--
Ed Light

Better World News TV Channel:
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Iraq Veterans Against the War and Related:
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http://couragetoresist.org
http://antiwar.com

Send spam to the FTC at
(e-mail address removed)
Thanks, robots.

 

[Rod Speed]

David Brown wrote

Ed Light wrote

Incremental backups are a poor choice if you want to restore data

Wrong when the sort of failure that requires a restore is rare.

Its no big deal if it takes a while to do the restore if you know what you are doing.

and if you don't want to restore it, why bother backing up?

No one said anything about not wanting to restore except you.

If you've got a set of a full backup and a dozen incremental backups, and you want to restore a particular file, it's
hard to find.

Not with a decent backup app that tells you where the restore needs to
come from or when you have all those backups on a single restore drive etc.

With the worst sorts of incremental backups (the "smarter" ones that save space by only saving the differences in
files), you have to start with the full backup, then work through each incremental backup until you get the data you
want.

Thats only true of files that are changed over time.

Differential backups are a bit better, since your file is either on the last full backup, or the last differential
backup.

And there is no difference with files that are either there or not like with photos etc.

And also remember that encryption adds a layer of risk to your recovery

No it doesnt if you have a decent backup system.

- it has certainly happened that people have lost their
backups because they forgot their encryption password.

Only fools get that happening.

If you have full control of your media, I recommend physical protection (lock it in a cupboard) rather than
encryption.

Useless for online backups.

And useless when the criminal breaks into that cupboard etc.

Makes a lot more sense to properly store the encryption password.

 

[Rod Speed]

David Brown wrote

Rod Speed wrote

For tools that produce some sort of bootable recovery disk, then it's not too bad - the required program is there on
the disk.

So your claim is just plain wrong.

And obviously there is a wide range of what you might call "specific program" - some backup programs are very common
and easily obtained, and therefore less of an issue.

In fact not an issue at all.

But I like to be able to read my data backups from any machine, at any time, using any operating system, and without
having any out of the ordinary software.

More fool you. That approach has massive downsides.

Anyway, it's up to the individual how they want to handle this - I am just pointing out that it's important to think
about these things.

You in fact proclaimed, you didnt say its something to be thought about.

I was thinking more of systems that use tapes, or the various sorts of removeable disks that have been used over the
years.

Then you ****ed up when you stated your original much too loosely.

For example, there was a time that ZIP drives were popular for backups. But if you are using old ZIP disks in an old
ZIP drive for backups, you might not be able to read them on a newer ZIP drive on a different machine.

And hardly anyone uses ZIP drives for backup anymore.

Again, it's just something to think about.

Thats nothing like what you were originally proclaiming.

You want your backups (atleast of irreplaceable data) to be safe and recoverable even if someone steals your machine,
or it blows up in a ball of smoke.

You should have said that its a good idea to avoid OBSCURE hardware.

Again, it is /usually/ a bad solution on its own.

Nope, most who use Win dont need to restore specific files that have
been deleted in error.

Complete restores are time-consuming to make,

The time is irrelevant if its done when the system isnt being used.

and time-consuming to restore,

The time is irrelevant when most dont ever need to do a restore
and much more time is involved in replacing the failed hard drive
when they do need to do a restore.

and result in you losing whatever you had on the machine after the last backup.

Not with a decent continuous backup system.

They are often locked to particular hardware, making them useless if your machine has died and you get a new one.

Thats just plain wrong with the often claim.

Complete restores are great for getting your machine in order again
after some serious failure - and as you say, they are easy to do. So
they are certainly useful. But they are not good as the /only/ backup
solution - you want something better for your photos, emails, data, etc.

Wrong if you are using a system that allows undeletes of accidental erroneous deletes.

User error of some sort /is/ the most common reason for losing data.

But not deleting the wrong file.

You are, of course, correct that there are other ways to get data back in some circumstances - in many cases, the
files will be in your
"Recycler", "Wastebasket", "Trashcan", or whatever your OS calls it

Most circumstances.

(it's not a windows feature - most desktops have them).
Duh.

Experts may also be happy using some sort of "undelete" utility. But the safest thing is to be sure you have a backup
of you data somewhere.

You didnt say anything about the safest.

Well, that's good. I am not happy with a backup unless it can be done /without/ a backup application,

More fool you with the restore of a file deleted by accident.

and I am not happy with something that takes a long time or is difficult to use.

You have always been, and always will be, completely and utterly irrelevant.

What you might or might not be happy with in spades.

For a great many people, "backup" means copying their "photo" folder
onto a USB stick or burning it onto a DVD, or uploading it to DropBox
every now and again. As long as you are sure to make these copies to at least two different places, such backups are
fine for data. You've got multiple independent copies, and you can get them back
whenever you need to regardless of what has broken on your main machine.

But much of this is a matter of personal opinion, and how /you/ like to handle your backups. The OP had asked for
opinions, so I've given a few.

You didnt say they were you opinions, you tried proclaiming instead.

More importantly, I've given some points that I think people
should consider, so that they can decide for themselves.

You didnt say that either.

 

[Rod Speed]

David Brown wrote

Sam wrote

No, apps are /not/ necessary for backup and restore. Some sort of application is necessary to do system backups and
restores (especially with windows).

But data is best stored using a simple copy
Wrong.

- it can then be restored by a simple copy.

Not when its data that keeps getting changed, it isnt a trivial
exercise for technoklutzes to work out which is the latest copy.

And manual copys are never by definition automatic and done reliably.

 

[Rod Speed]

David Brown wrote

Rod Speed wrote

There are a /lot/ of fools around - or at least, a lot of people who occasionally do something foolish.

Yes, but the solution is to fix the loss of encryption password
problem, not to not use backup encryption at all.

Its completely trivial to fix the loss of encryption password problem.

That's certainly the case - that's why I said "if you have full control of your media". With online backups, you
don't have that control.

So you dont get one of the best approaches to offsite backup
if your volumes are reasonable.

Yes, that's true - but they still haven't got anything more than they get when they steal your computer.

Thats wrong if you encrypt what you dont want to risk
a criminal getting hold of when they steal your computer.

Only a fool doesnt do that.

Clearly you have to weigh the pros and cons here against the risks and consequences - as I said.

Only a fool doesnt encrypt what they dont want a criminal to ever get hold of.