File backup(s)

Author
Discussion

Terminator X

Original Poster:

16,303 posts

211 months

What or who do you use? I'm a bit old school so backup onto a Sandisk drive that I plug in then remove. Conscious that online auto backups are probably better these days.

The file size is about 250Gbs at the moment.

TX.

98elise

28,196 posts

168 months

Google drive.

Covers all my photos, videos and documents.

alock

4,288 posts

218 months

All laptops back to a NAS. I never map network drives or save passwords to the NAS so that malware cannot easily trash or encrypt files on the NAS.
Backups are performed by simple batch files that prompt for the password, then use robocopy to synchronize folders.

The NAS backs-up to itself for versioning of files. This allows me to view most edits of all documents going back about 5 years.

That versioned NAS backup is then itself backed up to an external USB drive, and also to OneDrive. A few folders are excluded from the OneDrive backup due to only having 1TB available, e.g. virtual machines.
This external drive not shared on the network. It is also formatted as Fat32 so is easy to read on any laptop if the NAS dies.

Every couple of months I also synchronize everything to an external disk which spends 99% of it's time disconnected for obvious reasons.

Edited by alock on Monday 18th November 13:41

Captain_Morgan

1,253 posts

66 months

alock said:
All laptops back to a NAS. I never map network drives or save passwords to the NAS so that malware cannot easily trash or encrypt files on the NAS.
Backups are performed by simple batch files that prompt for the password, then use robocopy to synchronize folders.

The NAS backs-up to itself for versioning of files. This allows me to view most edits of all documents going back about 5 years.

That versioned NAS backup is then itself backed up to an external USB drive, and also to OneDrive. A few folders are excluded from the OneDrive backup due to only having 1TB available, e.g. virtual machines.
This external drive not shared on the network. It is also formatted as Fat32 so is easy to read on any laptop if the NAS dies.

Every couple of months I also synchronize everything to an external disk which spends 99% of it's time disconnected for obvious reasons.

Edited by alock on Monday 18th November 13:41
That’s a thumbup

Captain_Morgan

1,253 posts

66 months

Terminator X said:
What or who do you use? I'm a bit old school so backup onto a Sandisk drive that I plug in then remove. Conscious that online auto backups are probably better these days.

The file size is about 250Gbs at the moment.

TX.
I’d carry on with the portable drive and also add in a something like onedrive / google drive etc that way you have multiple copies of the data stored on different medium.

Harpoon

1,977 posts

221 months

Adding in an online service would be good. I'd also look for a deal on a couple more external backup drives when Black Friday comes around so you can ideally rotate them and keep one offsite.

eeLee

855 posts

87 months

Tuesday
quotequote all
I'm Cloud-first, mainly because it supports the way I work across Windows, macOS and mobile devices.
OneDrive is my source and version history.
On a daily basis, this is sucked down onto my NAS.
TimeMachine runs out to another NAS which then backs up to the first NAS.
I also have the first NAS backing up certain content to OneDrive under another account.

Main risk is human....!!

gangzoom

6,769 posts

222 months

Tuesday
quotequote all
All work stuff is on enterprise OneDrive - about 8gig of files and 20 years of emails.

Personal photos etc all on Google Drive and extra copy on FlickR (total cost for both is under £100/year).

Everything else - musics, games, films etc is all via streaming.

I have Synology NAS RAID drive and 2 other networked hard drives form the old days but 'the cloud' is so much easier to deal with/manage. The work stuff in particular is so simple as it all enterprise managed.

Edited by gangzoom on Tuesday 19th November 21:08

mikef

5,242 posts

258 months

Tuesday
quotequote all
  1. File History (Windows) and Time Machine (Mac) to a locally-connected SSD array so I can step back in time (you may not consider that a backup)
  2. Daily alternating backups to two on-prem Synology NAS units in different locations via LAN
  3. Daily backups of active document directories to cloud using Acronis
  4. Weekly system backups to locally-connected huge HDD using Acronis
  5. Weekly system backups of all documents to cloud using Acronis
  6. Monthly (at least) manual copies of of all documents to alternating plug-in Thunderbolt/USB-C SSD drives, one kept off site

768

15,092 posts

103 months

Tuesday
quotequote all
I use a local NAS (well, multiple). Think I'm up to 32TB of disks. Cloud storage costs always look huge to me, although I'd just use AWS for work clients.

thepritch

1,090 posts

172 months

Tuesday
quotequote all
Two Synology servers. One for project work, one for admin.

They used to have important folders backed up every night to externals, but they are now too small so I need to replace.

Over 20yrs of digi photos are my prized files so I try to take care of those first and foremost. Really like the synology’s - very simple to access and use and gives me peace of mind.

Steve_H80

375 posts

29 months

Yesterday (10:17)
quotequote all
I'm old-school too, so everything is in triplicate. I have a couple of hard disks that I plug just when required, one of which lives away from the house, and my Google drive.
Cloud backup is fine in the big city where you have an eight billion squigabyte connection, but out here in the sticks we still use carrier pigeons - it took over 3 weeks running 24/7 to upload all my photographs to the Google drive biglaugh