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What data backup strategies do you use/recommend? How much do you invest in backing up your personal data?
I recently had an SSD fail on me, less than a year old. Nothing important was on it and I'll be getting a warranty replacement, but this got me thinking - I still don't have a proper backup strategy. If my boot drive failed with most of my documents on it, that'd be lost or be expensive to recover.
What do you do to back up your data? What do you recommend others do? We have things like cloud backups, disks that act as a full backup and a whole lot more. Personally, I want to be able to set something up and not worry about it going wrong.
No, but it does provide insurance against a single SSD failure. It won't help if you overwrite your data, or if your house/office goes up in flames, or someone steals your rig, etc, but if your only real concern is drive failure then it's a good solution.
Edit: That's not to say anything in your comment is wrong. RAID and backups offer different solutions for different problems. RAID isn't a replacement for a backup, but it would have prevented OP's situation.
Yeah, hence the comment is still good that way. RAID is not a backup, it's redundancy. Important if you need your data to be available seamlessly in case the drive fails physically, but not the correct solution to protect against logical data corruption or deletion or so.
This is all really good advice that applies to enterprise level backups as well.
And remember 3-2-1 for data that you really want to ensure that you don't lose. Three copies on two different mediums with one of them stored in a different physical location.
If you don't trust cloud storage with your data encrypt it beforehand and they won't be able to touch it. For my crucial data I keep a flash drive in a firebox and a copy on my PC, and another on my Google drive using a different account than my main email.
I know this is going to seem like madness, but I kind of stopped caring. For my "important" data, which is about 20GB worth, I simply have SyncThing syncing between my laptop and Proxmox server, which is SFF and has no RAID. My music data, which is to me the next level of importance and about 500GB, also syncs between the two devices with SyncThing. The rest of my media just lives on the server, not backed up, not redundant. If that goes away, I'll just get it again. If I can't get it again, there are bigger problems going on in the world.
For my "important" data, of which probably only 5GB is actually truly important, I need to figure out what to do with it. I don't really trust most cloud providers, and I don't want to deal with the hassle of compressing and encrypting it and uploading it somewhere. I suppose I could automate that myself, but then I have to monitor it also and make sure it's working properly and it's just one more thing floating around in my brain.
I'm sort of waiting for Proton to get their act together and release a Linux app for Proton Drive, because I already use them for email and trust them enough. I used to use Tresorit, which was pretty good, but I didn't feel I was using it enough at the time for the price. But you do get 1TB for $14 a month, so maybe I'll go that route again and toss all my music up on it too. Either way, this is all getting me thinking again. I'm just sick of all the subscriptions.
More or less in same boat. I keep redundant copies of hard-to-source stuff. Especially music. But Disney movies? Nah that can and will get wiped periodically.
Same for me. Single-drive-backup works because the other instance of the data is my actual PC. I got a backup that's both a second copy and a slightly older version because the sync only runs once a day.
Yeah, sure, something might get lost. But I don't have important enough files.
Backblaze. Easy to get up and running and it just runs constantly in the background. You can download your stuff, if you ever need it, or have it all shipped on a hard drive (fee involved, but if/when you return the drive you get refunded). For additional privacy, if you care, you can encrypt your stuff with your own private key so only encrypted data gets uploaded (downside being if you every lose/forget that key you lose all your data).
It's saved me once, when my data drive (containing all my photos, videos, etc. over the past 10 years) just decided to die one morning.
I keep anything important in Dropbox. I have it synced to all of my devices, and use it to store my password management database (Keepass). All of my important documents also get digitized and put on there.
I had too many devices for the free plan, so I pay ~$200/yr for a family plan and my wife uses it as well. I used the free plan for years before deciding to just give them some money though.
In the event of needing to restore from backup (say, my password database gets corrupt, which happens frequently when I make edits on mobile for some reason), it's been a very painless process. It also makes getting a new laptop very easy, since I just have to install dropbox and everything syncs down.
I also use Dropbox but not for errythang.
You don't keep any physical backups? I suppose if you have multiple desktops that could suffice.
I keep almost everything in Dropbox. And two additional SSD backup drives One of which lives in a vault had a different location. I switch them every 2-3 months.
One huge tip for camera backups (on any cloud service) if your device will let you, turn off the default screenshot buttons. I had so many screenshots of my homepage or lock screen because all the phones I've had make the buttons where you hands normally rest the shortcut.
I just poked around and realized that you can actually deselect the screenshot folder for uploads. At least for my cell.
Dropbox is my "canonical" data storage. I use a lot of devices, so just for the purposes of making sure everything has everything absolutely necessary, I have to do something like this. Dropbox has the best clients across the 5 major OSes (iOS, Android, Linux, macOS, Windows), which I all do use on a regular basis. Most of the other cloud platforms are good on one but not at least one other.
Anything that I could not get on without (important photos, documents, files) is on Dropbox.
In addition to that, everything on macOS (including Dropbox, since it's on the filesystem) gets backed up by time machine. Everything on iOS is backed up by iCloud backups. The linux server has backups from the vendor I'm renting it from (which would also contain a copy of the dropbox folder). Android and windows are just YOLO, there's nothing really important there anyway, and both OSes have a habit of degrading over time for whatever reason.
I have considered using something like backblaze in addition, but I'm okay with the levels of redundancy at this point. If I have major data loss, it would have be a combination of 1) Dropbox's servers has data loss 2) my physical computer's drive is damaged 3) my time machine drive is damaged 4) my server's drives are damaged in their datacenter 5) my server's drive's backups are damaged.
At which point I may as well accept that I am destined for data loss. It must be a canonical event.
I have a home server, several workstations running MacOS and Windows, and mobile devices running iOS.
I sync all my important documents to my server and laptops via SyncThing. This is just for docs, not media like my photo library. I prefer this to network file shares for these docs, because I have local copies easily accessible on all devices. On mobile I can access these via my server’s network file share and VPN, if needed.
All storage-expensive media that we create (photos & video), are created on our phones, backed up to Google Photos in near-real time, and batch uploaded to a file share on our home server via the PhotoSync iOS app (its amazing btw, highly recommended for easy backup and photo / video management). Once media is backed up to the home server, we use Google Photos “free up space” feature to delete media from the phone that is now safely backed up to both google photos and the home server.
On the home server, the file share root is currently backed up to external disk via Windows File History. This will change soon, but I like this backup to be easily accessible in the event of server drive failure, and file history accomplishes this. It’s also versioned so it provides ransomware protection. I rotate 2 USB disks that serve as file history targets.
Further, I use Macrium Reflect to occasionally image the entire server disk. This is stored in-house, but physically distant from the server.
For offsite backups of the server (and by extension all our data) I use a little-known, excellent cloud backup tool called Blob Backup to pre-egress encrypt all data and ship it off to a BackBlaze B2 bucket. Worth noting, I use the original version of Blob Backup that is available in GitHub, not the BaaS version that you will likely stumble upon first if you google search for it. Blob Backup is excellent — blazing fast encrypted incremental backups to, and restores from, cloud object storage. It Just Works, and you don’t have to trust your cloud storage provider.
I think that’s it. In summary, high value docs are synced among devices (multiple local copies). The copy on the server is backed up on-site (files backup via File History, image backup via Macrium Refect) and offsite (files backup via Blob Backup—>B2). Media we create (family photos & videos) is saved on the server and backed up on-site & offsite. Media we didn’t create (movies & tv shows) are stored on the server and backed up locally only.
3-2-1 method. I pay for rsync.net which is not the cheapest but serves me well as an advanced Linux user.
As has been mentioned, it's really about how important the data is. I typically tell people these are the following questions you need to answer:
For low importance data and a low budget, get a couple external drives and set up an automated backup task. Plenty of free tools exist to copy files and folders between drives on a schedule.
For low to medium importance and a moderate budget, especially if you can afford potentially hours of restoration, I like cloud based backup services. They are simple and effective, but your internet service and the amount of data you want to back up will impact how quick it is and how much it costs, like a lot in some cases.
For high importance or lower but where you need/want quick recovery and have a large budget, a NAS is a great option. You buy 2 or more drives and you've got backup plus redundancy on your local network; definitely higher up front cost though, plus it's on you to replace drives if/when they go bad. Still, it's a lot faster since it's on your local network, you can even use it as a central file server to share stuff like videos or documents with your family or friends.
For critical importance stuff, definitely the 3-2-1 rule. A NAS still works as long as you also have an off-site copy being kept updated.
And don't be afraid to mix and match if you can/if it's easier. Windows let's you automatically sync your home folder to the cloud, which I do, so all my mundane files are backed up to the cloud. If my computer dies, I just log in on a different Windows computer and I'm back in business, mostly. I also have a NAS so I can store videos and pictures, things that are private, and family stuff, all over the local network. Important memories get redundancy and easy access. And then we also have Dropbox for some stuff, mostly when we need to share with friends or extended family.
I keep a copy of my digital assets on my nas on my nas and 2 separate software backups. 1 for the NAS which is set up on syncology shr raid, hyper backup of my NAS and my phone is backed up to my NAS and to iCloud.
I use Arq Backup and have one copy of my backup on-site (I have a diy NAS), and the other copy is stored offsite using Backblaze B2.
While more work to set up than using backblaze’s backup, I end up paying only $2-3 per month, half what their solution costs.
My situation is a little weird and hacky compared to the other replies.
Over the years, I ended up with some extra PCs lying around, because:
I use the Alienware as my main gaming PC and Plex media server, and the broken laptop as my backup server. The broken laptop has external HDDs plugged into it that match the capacities of the HDDs in the Alienware. Then, I keep a Syncthing instance running in the background, so that anything I do on the Alienware's drives gets mirrored to the broken laptop's drives.
If a hard drive ever fails (on either side), I can just replace it, then use Syncthing to restore the files from the remaining mirror of that hard drive.
It's maybe a bit overkill to have two always-on PCs and two sets of hard drives, but I prefer it to paying for a cloud service. :>
All computers back up to my unRAID server then are immediately backed up from there via Backblaze. The super critical stuff I have is static as I'm not adding more files to it, so I did a snapshot of that on B2 in case everything else fails.
I do still have that same data backing up to iDrive, but I'm trying to get away from them and move entirely to Backblaze. I'm still testing backups and strategies before I cancel with them though.
Started onsite with archival DVDs/BDs then moved to NAS/cold storage in the early 2000s. Thousands of DVDs/BDs without a robot sucks - imagine the cataloguing that had to be done. Once networks became faster I added offsite/cloud using Google Drive and Backblaze. For stuff I still access regularly I put up a DB on Notion (unlimited tier).
Very important stuff I have dupes of if not on NAS it's on HDDs that I run every few months, as well as on SSDs and offsite.
I work video production so mostly these are project files, RAWs, and other media related to the project at hand.
As for how much I have invested - too much, in time and money. The ease of solving issues arising from storage errors - priceless.
I use Borg Backup to make deduplicated encrypted backups of my documents and photos on my NAS and then I sync it to a Backblaze B2 bucket. I've only needed to use it once so far!
I sync about 80gb so it costs me less than a buck :D
Two NAS devices, raid 1. One at my parents and the other at mine. Synology is quite good with autobackups and one way syncs. Combine with UPS to ensure a blackout won't knock them out.
I use 2 strategies depending on the importance and replace-ability of the data.
The first strategy is that the data lives on a home server in a ZFS pool in RAID-Z2, which gives some fault tolerance and redundancy as a baseline (I can lose 2 drives without data loss). I have content like TV shows, movies, music, etc... that all live with only this protection. If I lose some, or all of it, it's fine. I can get it back, or not and life moves on.
The second strategy is for irreplaceable data like important documents and photos. This data also lives on the home server and so gets the benefit of strategy one as well. But this data also is backed up daily to a local NAS device, and to Backblaze B2 cloud storage (using Duplicati currently, but in the process of migrating to Restic).
In this way, all of my data has some level of protection from fault, like a drive failure, but I'm only paying for redundant backups of the truly irreplaceable data.