What is the smartest on-site backup strategy for my house?

39 Comments

Question: What is the smartest on-site backup strategy for my house? Time Machine? NAS? External SATA? DVD-R?

“There’s almost no end to backup solutions and configurations these days, and virtually no excuse for not backing up your computer,” Casey Johnston writes for Ars Technica. “Even if you have only a few important files, it’s worth it to shell out for an 8GB USB flash drive to store copies on; if you don’t, you’ll cry out that $20 you saved in anguished tears.”

Johnston writes, “For the most part, backup storage solutions vary on three axes: speed, cost, and flexibility. We’ll go over a few different types of storage, and you can determine what’s best for you based on your setup.”

Read more in the full article here.

39 Comments

  6. Whilst I can’t tell you what’s the smartest strategy, a choice among NAS, Time Machine and others that suits your pocket and ability to manage network storage, I CAN tell you what’s NOT the smartest: entrusting your backup storage to the Google cloud. 

    That’s the equivalent of advertising for free services that comes with a rape warning: your ass is not free from being raped by Google.

    Reply

    1. That’s my strategy as well.

      But the key is for at least one of those to be somewhere else, otherwise a fire or flood screws you as surely as if you had no backup at all.

      I also have key files on Dropbox.

      Reply

  10. Whatever you do as a primary backup infrastructure, you should *never* have keep your backup drives plugged into your home electricity. I do consulting work for insurance companies, and you wouldn’t believe how many home electrical systems get fried by strong surges from the grid (short), or from nature (lightning).

    You should always have one drive with all your data unattached to your computer or electricity. Do this emergency backup once a month or so, depending on how much new data you generate.

    Oh, and surge protectors are useless for strong high-voltage surges.

    Reply

    1. While that’s good advice, most people would never remember to unplug the drive. That’s why an offsite solution is imperative, plus all the redundant on-site backups melt just as easily as the next in a fire.

      Here’s my setup:

      1. Time Machine
      2. Backup to iDisk of imperative documents (QuickBooks files, etc.)
      3. CrashPlan offsite backup

      Between the 3 of these, my critical documents are backed up both onsite and offsite basically as they change. Plus, Time Machine gives me historical restore capabilities should I need it. I also love that CrashPlan encrypts on my iMac before securely transmitting to their servers.

      Reply

    2. Thank you for that sound advice. Very sensible. Always use an AVR when plugging a computer or NAS into your home electricity circuit. Never can have too much protection against lightning and electrical surges.

      Reply

  11. I had two extra laptop hard drives and bought external housings for them from meritline for like $3. I use one of them to backup my laptop with time machine. I have another computer a mac mini that I use to store videos and stuff and just bought a Promise DS4600 and 5 HD’s from newegg. Total was like $600, but its a RAID 5 and plugs in with Firewire 800. Haven’t used it yet it should be delivered here in about 1 more hour or so. But picked up that DS4600 for $250 at BHPhoto when it was like $800 and still is on Apple’s store and other places. Can’t wait to try it wish UPS would get here!!

    Reply

  13. Time Machine is the best. I used it when I accidentally ruined my hard drive. I then bought a new hard drive and used Time Machine to restore from the last back-up which was luckily a day before. It backed up everything as I had left perfectly. I didn’t have to re-install anything. Even the files on my desktop where exactly in the same location as I had left them. It was so easy, it was creepy.

    Reply

  14. Yes it is!

    I do software support. I see too many cases of intelligent people trusting data to the latest and greatest hardware and software, without having considered all the Bad Things that could happen.

    A good backup strategy should be redundant. Cloning a drive is good, but doesn’t help if a burglar makes off with your computer equipment or your home or office burns down. But don’t forget that there are circumstances that could make total reliance on backups to the cloud a mistake.

    Reply

  15. I use LokkBox (www.lokkbox.com) for my business offsite backup. They offer a fantastic service (designed for businesses only) and the prices are really reasonable. We’ve been with them for a few years now. You can backup any number of hosts and all you pay for is storage. It works really well with all of our Macs. We don’t even have local backup because we just set our Macs to backup every 60 minutes. Since the system does incremental backups, it only takes a few seconds.

    Reply

  16. I use SuperDuper for full bootable backups. It is easy to use, works very well, and I recommend it. I also like that the developer provides timely responses to queries and is accessible. I have not yet needed to restore, but I periodically sample my backup copies and the files all are there, and those that I sample function well.

    My question is regarding my Video backup and storage. I need a set-up that is practical and economical for large amounts of data. Has anyone tried that product (I forget the name), that allows you to buy standard internal HDDs and swap them in and out of a 4-bay tower on the fly? Redundancy is built-in so any single drive failure out of the four will not cause any loss of data.

    Reply

    3. According to Other World Computing tech support, RAID solutions have one huge downside: If the directory on one drive is irreparably damaged, the data on both drives will be lost. Given this fact, RAID drives should only be relied on for redundant storage, not primary storage and backup of the same data.

      Reply

      1. Redundant Array of Independent Disks…

        Depending on your RAID setup (various flavors of striping or mirroring) the above may or may not hold true. You may indeed be able to replace a single drive if it goes south w/o losing any data.

        Reply

  18. Even though we use a mixture of carboncopycloner and TimeMachine with a set of Drobos here at the office, there’s nothing that beats the Arq/S3 solution. If you, like me and everyone else these days, are considering to go with an online backup solution that simply kicks arse, look up Arq. It’s OSX only (windows users should look at cloudberry), 256bit encrypted (and the en/de-cryption is NOT made on the server side!) it’s affordable (S3 is actually very competitive) and most importantly, very frickin fast.

    http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

    Reply

  19. I have two big Terabyte hard drives with all files on: one is at work, the other at home. Dropbox is then used to keep any new or current files synced between the two. This way home and work are in sync and backed up, even in event of flood, theft, or local disaster (assuming whatever it is doesn’t take out both work and home) even then I’d have dropbox for the most important stuff.

    Reply

  20. Anyone know if there is a more automatic way to backup files to iDisk? Perhaps a written script somewhere that will backup specified files to iDisk, or a way to back up to iDisk at scheduled intervals?
    Thanks

    Reply

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