How many offline backups do you have?

How many offline backups do you have?

  • 0 - I live dangerously.

    Votes: 2 5.1%

  • 0 - Online all the way, baby.

    Votes: 4 10.3%

  • 1 - I only need one backup, right?

    Votes: 14 35.9%

  • 2 -3 - Yes, I do rotate.

    Votes: 13 33.3%

  • 4-5 - Redundancy, dude.

    Votes: 4 10.3%

  • 6-10 - You can't be too safe, right?

    Votes: 1 2.6%

  • 11+ - I'm a professional with professional data retention requirements.

    Votes: 1 2.6%
  • Total voters
    39
Q

Quartz-1

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
May 20, 2011
Messages
4,257
As one does, I've just backed up this, my home PC, to an external USB HDD. I then put it in my safe. There are two other backups in the safe (well, one backup, the other is the pre-upgrade disks). I also have another backup in my car, and an old backup with my brother. That's five in all.

I also have an online (but local) backup thanks to WSE 2012.

How many do you have?
 
Everything I can't afford to lose is on OneDrive. This includes wedding photos and financial docs. Not much else.
 
All computers dump files and a system image to a NAS weekly. NAS gets backed up monthly (manually) to a rotating external harddrive that I sneaker net to work. I'm going to get a new NAS soon - when I do, I'll put the old NAS at a relative's house and have critical files replicated over the interwebs to the old NAS every night.

Worst thing that would realistically happen to me is a house fire destroying everything, and I'd lose a month of data. OK, but it could be better.
 
Kongar said:
All computers dump files and a system image to a NAS weekly. NAS gets backed up monthly (manually) to a rotating external harddrive that I sneaker net to work. I'm going to get a new NAS soon - when I do, I'll put the old NAS at a relative's house and have critical files replicated over the interwebs to the old NAS every night.

Worst thing that would realistically happen to me is a house fire destroying everything, and I'd lose a month of data. OK, but it could be better.
Click to expand...

I just stream my porn nowadays so I lost the need to archive gigabytes of data :D
 
Nightly full backup of the entire NAS to an external USB enclosure. Nightly rotating backup of irreplaceable files (family photos, documents, records) to Amazon Glacier.

Any hardware problems, and I can recover quickly. A house fire, and I'd have to reburn/reencode a LOT of music, movies and TV shows, but nothing else would be lost.
 
I use File History to a hard drive assigned to the B drive and I also make a offline backup on a portable drive every few months. I also use OneDrive to store important documents, which itself has a trash can to recover.
 
My system is not critical so just make one backup which I keep on an external HDD and an internal HDD. I only backup system partition too.
 
I have a fully outfitted home office with a MetroE connection back to my office and colo. We run a few fairly large NAS systems with ZFS snapshots, all of my data has at least 2 other copies, with another being a nightly pull from one of our systems to another employees residence.
 
Backed up to a server in house, then periodically, important stuff, is dumped into an S3 bucket.
 
I have 2 rotating offline backups: I use Crashplan for this. I also use Dropbox (free) for 1Password login database, OneDrive (paid) for important documents and files, and CrashPlan cloud as my third backup. Oh, I use Windows to create a recovery disk of my system drive with the full OS option.
 
Drobo 5n for 1 copy of files.
Dell R710 where the files are live and in use.
My desktop with a dedicated drive for backup.
Google Drive plan with an additional copy of those files.
 
ATM I just have a secondary HDD in my desktop that files move to weekly. Then nightly I have Crashplan backups with monthly and yearly archiving. I plan to get a NAS to add into the mix and for more central storage of family pictures movies and important documents.
 
I used to have 0 backups, but now I have at least 1. I don't really honestly need it though, there isn't much data I have personally that I need backed up.

Now at work it is an entirely different matter. However, I do design some systems that can be blown away and rebuilt at a moment's notice.
 
Everything I need backed up is reduntantly backed up between OneDrive and Google Drive. Except for my ripped movies. That has a local redundant backup only so I don't have to waste time re-ripping everything should the main drives housing the used copies of the movies die.
 
staknhalo said:
Everything I need backed up is reduntantly backed up between OneDrive and Google Drive. Except for my ripped movies. That has a local redundant backup only so I don't have to waste time re-ripping everything should the main drives housing the used copies of the movies die.
Click to expand...

Google Drive is a synchronisation service, using a synchronisation service as a backup service is a poor idea at best.
 
auntjemima said:
Why? Saying it's a poor idea without explaining why isn't helping anyone.
Click to expand...

Well I thought it was obvious.

If you accidentally delete an important file or files without realising and exceed 25 days, the files you deleted are permanently gone on every device synced with the service.

Furthermore there's no file versioning, you can't go back in history and restore a file from a specific date and based on all the clients I've seen only one folder can be synchronised.

Using a synchronisation service as a backup solution is a crude process at best, in my opinion it's one best avoided as you're relying on a solution that was never intended to be used as a backup service to safeguard your important data.

I use Google Drive as intended, as a synchronisation service to access work documents on the go via my mobile device. However my backup solution is two USB HDD's rotated nightly with the unused drive kept in the workshop which is a seperate building to the house.

For example, you wouldn't believe the amount of people that loose precious photos because they deleted them off their iPhone while believing the originals were safely on their MacBook and ran over the recovery period as they had no idea what they'd done.
 
Offline? Uhmmm... none, come to think of it. At this point I've gone on a massive "delete fucking everything" kick the past few days, literally I'm down to the 250GB SSD in my laptop, a 128GB SSD on an eSATA port, and a 500GB drive on another eSATA port and there's probably less than 100GB of data spread across all of 'em. I did recently dump a ton of stuff on a few Google accounts because I got some of those 100GB for 2 years credits from LG so, I figured I might as well toss stuff up there just in case.

Optical storage is still my primary backup, actually, I still use a pretty rock solid backup strategy with disc sets, PAR2 sets, SHA1 checksums and other stuff and in 20+ years of using optical storage to this day I still haven't really lost a single byte of data that truly matters. Good media (Taiyo Yuden), burned at half the rated speed (works out to 8x), on a solid burner (Plextor) and I'm good to go.

Never was the type to hoard everything just because I technically have the capability, never cared to have any super-size hard drives either at this point. Got a 1TB Hitachi hard drive in the wife's laptop, that's got 780GB free space on it so, yeah, not like I'm worried about losing anything. :D
 
^ very interesting to read your philosophy. I have been slowly letting go of my digital hoarder obsession, starting with emails: I deleted a decade worth of that last year. Hopefully, I will move onto other stuff that - really and truly - just doesn't need to be kept.
 
I just personally have never had a lot of data that I find worth keeping around I guess. In today's world we all would have to agree that the single largest chunk of space for most folks is video files, and we'd all probably tend to agree that for a large chunk of people "out there" that means stuff they've accumulated because of downloading video files encoded by others in other places aka "release groups" or whatever, from torrents or direct download sites, as well as music too but, considering a movie file can be multiple gigabytes in size and a music file is a few megabytes here and there it's not like there's a direct comparison. My entire audio collection - transcoded from original CDs to FLAC for local storage years ago then burned to DVD5 and in the past 2 years transcoded from FLAC to Opus 128 Kbps files with proper tags and embedded artwork - is barely 22GB these days and that's 2300+ CDs.

I've got that sitting on the 64GB microSD card in my G4, it's also backed up on one of my Google accounts as previously mentioned, and I have it spread over six DVD5 discs as well for safe keeping too. But as for movies, while at one point I did have a few hundred gigs of *cough*stuff*cough* I don't have it anymore, that was part of the mass delete a few days ago, like 715GB of rather nicely done 10-bit HEVC 1080p encodes and I honestly don't miss 'em at all at this point. What with streaming being so readily available nowadays I guess it's just a non-issue anymore in terms of keeping 'em around. I own 4 Blu-rays that I got at a pawn shop because someone gave me a laptop with a Blu-ray drive in it and as luck would have it the drive was dead so, the $7 I spent on the Blu-rays was negligible. :)

Owned a few hundred retail movie DVDs over the years, got to a point where I wanted to get rid of 'em (what a space consumer those things are in those DVD boxes) so I spent a few weeks ripping all of 'em with DVDDecrypter and feeding them into DVDShrink so they'd all end up in DVD5 format. I sold all the original DVDs at a pretty severe discount compared to the original costs (ain't that always the case), then just last year I gave away all the ripped DVDs I'd made to a few residents in my apartment building so they'd have some movies to watch.

At this point I just don't care about having massive piles of stuff in terms of data. The music is important, however, can't live without that since in my experience all modern music just flat out fucking sucks (I'm a fan of 70s and 80s tunes, those were my years of youth) so I have to rely on the stuff I've collected more so than anything else. Sometimes I find something new that is nice but it's so incredibly rare these days as to practically not happen at all.

Just rambling I suppose, but yeah, I've known and do know some folks that are data hoarders and it amazes me just how much time and effort and of course money they spend to just keep acquiring data 24/7, absolutely stunning in some instances. I know one guy that literally has 1.5PB - yes, Petabytes, seriously - of home storage and he just keeps adding more. He's an online poker player, made a fortune with it over the years, not even sure how anymore considering all the restrictions nowadays but he's still at it and just keeps grinding it out, blowing money hand over fist on storage hardware to keep filling it up with anything he can snatch on his Cox Gigabit connection.

Crazy people, I swear. :D
 
Good grief, did you convert your FLAC files to 128kps files and delete the FLACs? :nailbiting:
 
No, still got the DVDs with the FLACs, those aren't going anywhere, but I am considering selling off the 2300+ CDs I still own. Keeping them in environmentally controlled storage for the past decade has been somewhat of a drain on the bank account I suppose (no that's not the only thing in storage, for the record). Might have to offload 'em at some point if I could even find a service interested in buying the whole collection at once. Considering the sheer amount of money I put into it, if I get even 20% of that back it would be a small miracle I suppose. :)
 
2300 CD's! Impressive archive you have there.

I personally don't back up my media, the only thing I can't loose is data relating to my business so that's what gets backed up. Loosing my media would be a slight inconvenience, but we can rebuild such things, loosing business data is a world of hurt.
 
I assume we're talking home stuff?

Every time her Jeep pulls into the driveway, it automatically backs up all our family photos and documents to a pair of encrypted Enteprise SSD's in sequence. Scripts report any errors/success via email and then it shuts off. All done off a headless cherry trail compute stick running BSD and USB 3 drive connections under the spare tire. The Wifi antenna runs at the very edge of the glass at the trim on the rear passenger side. Once a week I plunk a Compact flash card into the old PC and sync the family photos and docs and swap it for a different one when I visit my server room in a remote location (weekly)

Those are the offline backups.
 
Back up? What back up? I never keep anything remotely important on any of my comps. Foolproof way of never screwin shit up.
 
I am probably in the minority. critical stuff is backed up to IDrive(not apple...,) and an encrypted folder on my 1tb dropbox. Complete backup on an external and an internal.
 
I use externals and optical discs as my backup media, in addition to the original.

Optical media makes sure you have an untouchable version of the file you want to backup.

I don't use cloud for redundancy, too expensive, too sensitive and I don't trust either myself or the cloud provider doing their jobs properly securing the data.
 
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