Home PCs Data Backup
Discussion
Background
So I have 3 PCs at home, a mix of Win 10, 11, Home and Pro editions.
I have OneDrive and Google Drive accounts and currently backup to OneDrive. In actual fact, I think OD removes the 'local' copies of the files and stores them exclusively on OD.
Not all machines are on all the time and total data is a few Gb in size.
What I'm considering is a 'local' backup device, that all the machines can connect to, via the home WiFi network, to directly and automatically backup to.
So I'm assuming I'd need a storage device and also backup software to run on the 3 machines to automatically backup every day.
Budgetwise, I'd be looking at about £100 or so.
Of course, "Plan B" would simply be to use a USB drive, plug it in once a week and backup everything. I've got a 128GB USB stick I could use; but it's more the convenience, and assurance that everything is backed up on a given schedule; plus also figuring out what to backup each time (ie - what's been updated since the last backup).
So a question to the floor - any recommendations, suggestions, ideas, etc? Other than "don't be a lazy arse" and do it manually every day .......
So I have 3 PCs at home, a mix of Win 10, 11, Home and Pro editions.
I have OneDrive and Google Drive accounts and currently backup to OneDrive. In actual fact, I think OD removes the 'local' copies of the files and stores them exclusively on OD.
Not all machines are on all the time and total data is a few Gb in size.
What I'm considering is a 'local' backup device, that all the machines can connect to, via the home WiFi network, to directly and automatically backup to.
So I'm assuming I'd need a storage device and also backup software to run on the 3 machines to automatically backup every day.
Budgetwise, I'd be looking at about £100 or so.
Of course, "Plan B" would simply be to use a USB drive, plug it in once a week and backup everything. I've got a 128GB USB stick I could use; but it's more the convenience, and assurance that everything is backed up on a given schedule; plus also figuring out what to backup each time (ie - what's been updated since the last backup).
So a question to the floor - any recommendations, suggestions, ideas, etc? Other than "don't be a lazy arse" and do it manually every day .......
The hardest part of a good backup to get right is getting a process in place that works for you. It needs to be performed AND tested regularly.
Will you really go to every PC regularly and perform a manual backup? If you are going to do this then get at least two external devices and alternate them. More than two would be even better.
With a £100 budget, most of the better home solutions are ruled out.
If you can up your budget to £200 ish, then a single disk NAS becomes viable.
Will you really go to every PC regularly and perform a manual backup? If you are going to do this then get at least two external devices and alternate them. More than two would be even better.
With a £100 budget, most of the better home solutions are ruled out.
If you can up your budget to £200 ish, then a single disk NAS becomes viable.
What will a local backup give you that your existing cloud solution doesn't? Also your budget is about a third of what you would likely need to spend for a local solution, which you inevitably will need to sync to a cloud backup as well as a local backup is susceptible to theft/fire/disk failure etc
ETA I do local and cloud backups
ETA I do local and cloud backups
For software look at: https://www.macrium.com/products/home
A 4 seat license pack is available at 60% off at the moment.
A 4 seat license pack is available at 60% off at the moment.
alock said:
The hardest part of a good backup to get right is getting a process in place that works for you. It needs to be performed AND tested regularly.
Will you really go to every PC regularly and perform a manual backup? If you are going to do this then get at least two external devices and alternate them. More than two would be even better.
With a £100 budget, most of the better home solutions are ruled out.
If you can up your budget to £200 ish, then a single disk NAS becomes viable.
Something like a Synology DS220j (or more modern 223j) with a single drive would do. Synology Drive can be installed on each of the devices you wish to backup and it will do it wirelessly over the network. Sync takes place as soon as any files are edited and there is a vast array of options/customisation.Will you really go to every PC regularly and perform a manual backup? If you are going to do this then get at least two external devices and alternate them. More than two would be even better.
With a £100 budget, most of the better home solutions are ruled out.
If you can up your budget to £200 ish, then a single disk NAS becomes viable.
I'm in a similar position & have concluded there's no really "good" answer to this one.
Using "cloud" options - Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox - put you at risk of losing all the backups if for any reason the provider doesn't like what you've done (I read some time ago that an Xbox user did something Microsoft didn't like - no idea what - & MS froze his account, which meant he lost access to OneDrive files). Horrible.
Also, you need to make sure, particularly with OneDrive, that you have the local copies option set. It seesm to default to just downloading files from the cloud when you need them. Fine for "Corporate" users, but not what a home user wants.
Home solutions such as a NAS seem quite pricey. A NAS, as far as I can tell, runs 24/7 so uses electricity, and there's the question of how robust is it in the event of a power cut. That leads me to think you'd likely also need a UPS. So quite a committment both in terms of money, space, maybe noise, and getting to grips with the various types of RAID etc. And the cheap NAS's seem to be only single disk, which doesn't seem very sensible - surely for "proper" backup you need the data in at least three locations?
I've recently looked at a "DAS" (Direct Attached Storage) - basically an external HDD attached to the main PC. Seems potentially viable, but you would need two disks or USB sticks to achieve the desired "main + 2 X backup". This opens the discussion about what is a suitable backup medium. USB sticks are more robust (you can drop them!), but there's questions about their reliability and allegedly there's many fakes on sale. HDD's are cheaper and faster, but of course are more prone to mechanical damage.
There's also the Windows option of Windows File History, which backs up to an external HDD. This is simple, but I've not found much data about how robust this system is.
My personal "solution" (for the moment) is to use the cloud providers free options plus Windows File History, plus an external HDD. The downside is that it's all manual (the external HDD has to be plugged in) so is dependant on me getting around to doing the backups.
Using "cloud" options - Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox - put you at risk of losing all the backups if for any reason the provider doesn't like what you've done (I read some time ago that an Xbox user did something Microsoft didn't like - no idea what - & MS froze his account, which meant he lost access to OneDrive files). Horrible.
Also, you need to make sure, particularly with OneDrive, that you have the local copies option set. It seesm to default to just downloading files from the cloud when you need them. Fine for "Corporate" users, but not what a home user wants.
Home solutions such as a NAS seem quite pricey. A NAS, as far as I can tell, runs 24/7 so uses electricity, and there's the question of how robust is it in the event of a power cut. That leads me to think you'd likely also need a UPS. So quite a committment both in terms of money, space, maybe noise, and getting to grips with the various types of RAID etc. And the cheap NAS's seem to be only single disk, which doesn't seem very sensible - surely for "proper" backup you need the data in at least three locations?
I've recently looked at a "DAS" (Direct Attached Storage) - basically an external HDD attached to the main PC. Seems potentially viable, but you would need two disks or USB sticks to achieve the desired "main + 2 X backup". This opens the discussion about what is a suitable backup medium. USB sticks are more robust (you can drop them!), but there's questions about their reliability and allegedly there's many fakes on sale. HDD's are cheaper and faster, but of course are more prone to mechanical damage.
There's also the Windows option of Windows File History, which backs up to an external HDD. This is simple, but I've not found much data about how robust this system is.
My personal "solution" (for the moment) is to use the cloud providers free options plus Windows File History, plus an external HDD. The downside is that it's all manual (the external HDD has to be plugged in) so is dependant on me getting around to doing the backups.
For your budget just carry on syncing to a cloud solution. If you put a Synology in the system then you'll lose everything if the house burns down & you have no on-site backup. Onedrive & Dropbox don't encrypt locally but Sync does & if you sign up for a free account they will badger you with cheap upgrade - 50% off for life is one I've received.
https://www.sync.com/en/
If you can remember do monthly images to an external drive so at least you can recover your PC setup if required.
https://www.sync.com/en/
If you can remember do monthly images to an external drive so at least you can recover your PC setup if required.
Callerton said:
Home solutions such as a NAS seem quite pricey. A NAS, as far as I can tell, runs 24/7 so uses electricity, and there's the question of how robust is it in the event of a power cut. That leads me to think you'd likely also need a UPS. So quite a committment both in terms of money, space, maybe noise, and getting to grips with the various types of RAID etc.
I've had my Synology NAS for very many years - more than 10 I think - and despite a number of power cuts, it's never caused an issue. It is on 24/7 but I doubt that it uses enough power to make much difference to an annual bill - and even if it did, it can be configured to sleep when not in use.As for RAID - I just left mine to use the default. When a disk failed last year, I simply swapped in a new disk.
Noise is a point though - fan is noticeable, so you do have to take care with where you keep it.
Callerton said:
And the cheap NAS's seem to be only single disk, which doesn't seem very sensible - surely for "proper" backup you need the data in at least three locations?
RAID does not give you multiple backup locations. It gives you redundancy, i.e. keeps the data live for a short time while one disk is out of action. This is often required for business but very rarely required for home users.Personally I do this:
- Single disk Synology DS124. Mine has a 4TB disk in it, but I could have made do with 2TB. This is about £200
- All computers use free software to backup to the NAS. I never map drives or save passwords to the NAS because this is an easy attack vector for malware to start encrypting stuff.
- The NAS runs the free Synology software to backup the shared folders to itself. This backup is not exposed to the network and gives me file versioning. I can look in this backup for any edit to any file in the last few years.
- The NAS performs a nightly backup of itself to an external USB disk. This is formatted as Fat32 so if the NAS dies I can just plug this disk into any laptop. This disk is about £50. I have a full folder copy on this disk as well as the versioned Synology backup that would require the Synology software to access.
- Every couple of months I also copy everything off the NAS to another external disk that lives in a fire safe.
- The critical folders on the NAS also sync to OneDrive. I only have 1TB available here so exclude movie rips. This gives me world wide access to all my files without having to expose the NAS to the internet. OneDrive also implements its own versioning.
I will add that the worst thing to do is buy an expensive multi-disk NAS and have all computers map a drive to a single large file share. You are massively exposed to the type of malware that encrypts files. If one computer gets one of these, it will be encrypting files on the NAS within seconds. RAID does not help you.
Edited by alock on Wednesday 7th January 12:04
be careful with onedrive, I was watching a clip on tiktok the other day about how it just deleted someones files. Not the cloud copy, the local copy.
https://www.tiktok.com/@jasonkpargin/video/7591592...
https://www.tiktok.com/@jasonkpargin/video/7591592...
Yeah, there are loads of examples on the internet, I think there was one on here a year or two ago, where idiots setup One Drive so that it deletes their local files and then they can One Drive for spying on them and lose everything.
Luckily if you just install One Drive, point it at your Documents Folder and leave it alone it will just run forever keeping your files synced with the Cloud. Unless you put dodgy files on there, then they will nuke your Cloud copies.
For the OP, the best solution is to use One Drive sync on all the machines and turn on the local copies, then using the machines will sync everything around and minimise the risk. This is free.
Alongside that, there are plenty of free backup solutions that will make copies of the files and manage retention of the copies so that you can recover files you have deleted yourself by mistake. Just configure a round-robin set of copies on a daily sync and retain the last 5 successful copies. You'll be very well covered for nothing then.
If you want to spend money, you'd be better off setting up a dedicated server to host your files centrally, then riff off that with One Drive for simple Cloud Storage, though you have hundreds of options for how that works and all the other things you can then do with that machine. I use UnRaid, primarily to run RAID storage, but it's running Docker and VMs for all sorts of things now as well. I backup to One Drive directly from there and am able to go up to 6Tb for the price of one Office 365 Family License.
Luckily if you just install One Drive, point it at your Documents Folder and leave it alone it will just run forever keeping your files synced with the Cloud. Unless you put dodgy files on there, then they will nuke your Cloud copies.
For the OP, the best solution is to use One Drive sync on all the machines and turn on the local copies, then using the machines will sync everything around and minimise the risk. This is free.
Alongside that, there are plenty of free backup solutions that will make copies of the files and manage retention of the copies so that you can recover files you have deleted yourself by mistake. Just configure a round-robin set of copies on a daily sync and retain the last 5 successful copies. You'll be very well covered for nothing then.
If you want to spend money, you'd be better off setting up a dedicated server to host your files centrally, then riff off that with One Drive for simple Cloud Storage, though you have hundreds of options for how that works and all the other things you can then do with that machine. I use UnRaid, primarily to run RAID storage, but it's running Docker and VMs for all sorts of things now as well. I backup to One Drive directly from there and am able to go up to 6Tb for the price of one Office 365 Family License.
Duplicati might be worth a look. The free version can monitor backup on 5 devices
https://duplicati.com/pricing
It supports standard backup destinations like a USB HD or a NAS, plus lots of cloud storage providers / sync platforms.
https://docs.duplicati.com/backup-destinations/des...
https://duplicati.com/pricing
It supports standard backup destinations like a USB HD or a NAS, plus lots of cloud storage providers / sync platforms.
https://docs.duplicati.com/backup-destinations/des...
A local NAS isn't a true backup, if your house burns down you lose the NAS as well. However it is a very useful local copy you can restore from if you accidentally delete something or your PC dies and trashes some files.
I have a 4 bay NAS (Synology DS920+) running Synology Hybrid Raid (single disk redundancy) and have Synology Drive Client running on my PC and both our laptops which constantly updates the NAS with the latest files. The NAS is also really useful as a shared network drive for stuff my wife and I both want access to, and a media library.
For full backup though I take a backup of the NAS every so often on a USB drive and keep that at work. However I'm tempted to switch to an online backup of the NAS, something like Bakckblaze at $99/year.
If you're using a NAS as a local copy and still backing up everything online it's not really as important to have a multi disk raid system, so cheaper single disk systems might do the job.
I have a 4 bay NAS (Synology DS920+) running Synology Hybrid Raid (single disk redundancy) and have Synology Drive Client running on my PC and both our laptops which constantly updates the NAS with the latest files. The NAS is also really useful as a shared network drive for stuff my wife and I both want access to, and a media library.
For full backup though I take a backup of the NAS every so often on a USB drive and keep that at work. However I'm tempted to switch to an online backup of the NAS, something like Bakckblaze at $99/year.
If you're using a NAS as a local copy and still backing up everything online it's not really as important to have a multi disk raid system, so cheaper single disk systems might do the job.
I have a 1 bay Synology NAS, which is synced with Google Drive and to multiple PCs.
Gives (IMO) as much redundancy and backup as anyone could need. If any drive fails there are at least 2 other copies. If the house burns down then the cloud storage will be there. If I fall out with Google and cancel my Drive subscription there are others I can copy to in a short space of time.
You could also get the NAS to backup to a separate/external HD, although at some point I will probably upgrade to a 2 bay NAS, for further redundancy.
The NAS has a very small UPS attached, which gives about 2 hours of power. I found the most annoying thing to be short power outages, which knocked the NAS offline and then I had to reboot it by pressing a button. 2 hours of power will cover 80/90% of power cuts and as of yet I've not had to reboot it after an outage.
Yes the NAS is on 24/7, but the power usage is very low and once you have it, you can use it for all sorts of things, It also works as a CCTV camera NVR, and using Docker you can run hundreds of things from it.
Gives (IMO) as much redundancy and backup as anyone could need. If any drive fails there are at least 2 other copies. If the house burns down then the cloud storage will be there. If I fall out with Google and cancel my Drive subscription there are others I can copy to in a short space of time.
You could also get the NAS to backup to a separate/external HD, although at some point I will probably upgrade to a 2 bay NAS, for further redundancy.
The NAS has a very small UPS attached, which gives about 2 hours of power. I found the most annoying thing to be short power outages, which knocked the NAS offline and then I had to reboot it by pressing a button. 2 hours of power will cover 80/90% of power cuts and as of yet I've not had to reboot it after an outage.
Yes the NAS is on 24/7, but the power usage is very low and once you have it, you can use it for all sorts of things, It also works as a CCTV camera NVR, and using Docker you can run hundreds of things from it.
A catastrophic failure of my data HDD made me ask advice of a friend on securing backup.
I divide my data into three: 1/ must not lose, 2/ loss would be irritating, and 3/ can redo without too much effort.
I use two cloud-based methods for 1/, one of which also includes 2/. I have a number of HDDs at home, and I save two copies of 1/, 2/ and 3/ to them, regularly updated, last complete update 4 Jan. 1/ I update frequently, 2/ less frequently, and 3/, well, work it out.
Each HDD on my desktop is replaced every three years or so, which means larger each time, and the replaced item becomes a backup one. The ones I remove I fill mainly with copies of 1/ and 2/. I store these off-site. When the external HDDs are not being updated, they are switched off so no chance of them being attacked.
Upsides: Feeling of data security. That's a biggy of course. And it's a cheap option, although that's not an essential: security is.
Dowsides: 1/ The method is manual and includes a full virus check before updates so takes time, 2/ I have to keep a record of what I've done and what update is next, 3/ 'Regular' as regards updates in a misnomer. There's slippage, 4/ My desk has a lot of clutter.
Re: 4/, I've been trying to come up with a way of making all the clutter disappear. I have five HDDs, a socket extension with five switched sockets, and plugs of course, and a USB hub, also switched.
I divide my data into three: 1/ must not lose, 2/ loss would be irritating, and 3/ can redo without too much effort.
I use two cloud-based methods for 1/, one of which also includes 2/. I have a number of HDDs at home, and I save two copies of 1/, 2/ and 3/ to them, regularly updated, last complete update 4 Jan. 1/ I update frequently, 2/ less frequently, and 3/, well, work it out.
Each HDD on my desktop is replaced every three years or so, which means larger each time, and the replaced item becomes a backup one. The ones I remove I fill mainly with copies of 1/ and 2/. I store these off-site. When the external HDDs are not being updated, they are switched off so no chance of them being attacked.
Upsides: Feeling of data security. That's a biggy of course. And it's a cheap option, although that's not an essential: security is.
Dowsides: 1/ The method is manual and includes a full virus check before updates so takes time, 2/ I have to keep a record of what I've done and what update is next, 3/ 'Regular' as regards updates in a misnomer. There's slippage, 4/ My desk has a lot of clutter.
Re: 4/, I've been trying to come up with a way of making all the clutter disappear. I have five HDDs, a socket extension with five switched sockets, and plugs of course, and a USB hub, also switched.
mjcneat said:
Something like a Synology DS220j (or more modern 223j) with a single drive would do. Synology Drive can be installed on each of the devices you wish to backup and it will do it wirelessly over the network. Sync takes place as soon as any files are edited and there is a vast array of options/customisation.
Definitely test disaster recovery with it.Ime it was rubbish. Ie, someone could nick it and all your data is gone and readable.
Encrypt it and you need a Usb stick insert to boot it, then remove and keep safe, great. But I had issues with hot removal and corruption.
But then no way to save the actual keys and recover a drive, without using the device itself.
So device gets nicked and your backups are unrecoverable without that physical NAS.
So backup of the NAS is critical to a recoverable media (ie, you can get the keys, or run software on windows to decrypt it, veracrypt, bitlocker etc)
So all your doing is adding £££ hardware to then back that up again from a central location.
Much better to just image machines using macrium free (get an old copy of the free one) to a big HDD every few weeks.
Bitlocker that drive with a password key so it’ll work on any machine with just the password.
Derek Smith said:
A catastrophic failure of my data HDD made me ask advice of a friend on securing backup.
I divide my data into three: 1/ must not lose, 2/ loss would be irritating, and 3/ can redo without too much effort.
I use two cloud-based methods for 1/, one of which also includes 2/. I have a number of HDDs at home, and I save two copies of 1/, 2/ and 3/ to them, regularly updated, last complete update 4 Jan. 1/ I update frequently, 2/ less frequently, and 3/, well, work it out.
Each HDD on my desktop is replaced every three years or so, which means larger each time, and the replaced item becomes a backup one. The ones I remove I fill mainly with copies of 1/ and 2/. I store these off-site. When the external HDDs are not being updated, they are switched off so no chance of them being attacked.
Upsides: Feeling of data security. That's a biggy of course. And it's a cheap option, although that's not an essential: security is.
Dowsides: 1/ The method is manual and includes a full virus check before updates so takes time, 2/ I have to keep a record of what I've done and what update is next, 3/ 'Regular' as regards updates in a misnomer. There's slippage, 4/ My desk has a lot of clutter.
Re: 4/, I've been trying to come up with a way of making all the clutter disappear. I have five HDDs, a socket extension with five switched sockets, and plugs of course, and a USB hub, also switched.
Downside 5/ - HDDs are much more likely to fail at power up than if running all the timeI divide my data into three: 1/ must not lose, 2/ loss would be irritating, and 3/ can redo without too much effort.
I use two cloud-based methods for 1/, one of which also includes 2/. I have a number of HDDs at home, and I save two copies of 1/, 2/ and 3/ to them, regularly updated, last complete update 4 Jan. 1/ I update frequently, 2/ less frequently, and 3/, well, work it out.
Each HDD on my desktop is replaced every three years or so, which means larger each time, and the replaced item becomes a backup one. The ones I remove I fill mainly with copies of 1/ and 2/. I store these off-site. When the external HDDs are not being updated, they are switched off so no chance of them being attacked.
Upsides: Feeling of data security. That's a biggy of course. And it's a cheap option, although that's not an essential: security is.
Dowsides: 1/ The method is manual and includes a full virus check before updates so takes time, 2/ I have to keep a record of what I've done and what update is next, 3/ 'Regular' as regards updates in a misnomer. There's slippage, 4/ My desk has a lot of clutter.
Re: 4/, I've been trying to come up with a way of making all the clutter disappear. I have five HDDs, a socket extension with five switched sockets, and plugs of course, and a USB hub, also switched.
I run truenas with 3 HDDs, one pair made up of 2 18TB drives mirrored is around 14TB usable and has your 1/ and 2/, the other is a 20TB drive holding 3/ - mainly TV and movies to serve to the household. All run continuously.
My 1/ data is also backed up to icloud but it's less than 2TB.
This is my bread and butter. I make my living by buidling multi-petabyte scale storage for governments.
You should ideally be following the 321 rule. No Bully.
321 rule:
You should have 3 copies of your important data.
Your data should be stored on 2 kinds of physical media.
You should have at least one copy of your data off-site in case your house burns down.
Using Onedrive or Google Drive isn't a backup as it moves your data to the cloud and then doesn't necessarily keep copies of past data. So if you change a file accidentally or delete it, it's gone forever.
I do the following. My data is stored on a NAS with 13 drives in two RAID-6 pools. So each pool can tolerate more than one failure. One pool is my primary storage. It is backed up to the other pool. In addition, I have my NAS make immutable snapshots at regular intervals. So if I delete or change a file accidentally, I can recover any version of it from snapshot. And if my primary disk pool fails rendering all snapshots inaccessible, I can steill recover my data locally.
In addition: All my important data is stored on Amazon AWS Glacier. I hope I never need to read from it. The same data is also copied to Backblaze. Every time a file is changed, a new version is created. So that if my house were to be burgled or burn down, I can still retrieve even past copies of important data or things I've deleted.
My Backblaze contains about 25TB and my local NAS, both primary and backup is around 112TB raw, but less available since 4 disks are allocated to parity data.
In your case, you will find it difficult to buy any kind of dedicated NAS for £100. But you could use an old Raspberry Pi with ideally two large disks hung off it, configured in a RAID mirror. That way, all your computers can back up to them. You could use Windows File Backup or you could use Time Machine if you have Mac(s).
But definitely install the Backblaze client on each machine and backup up your computer properly online. That would mean you have three copies of the data, with the raspberry Pi as a NAS.
You should ideally be following the 321 rule. No Bully.
321 rule:
You should have 3 copies of your important data.
Your data should be stored on 2 kinds of physical media.
You should have at least one copy of your data off-site in case your house burns down.
Using Onedrive or Google Drive isn't a backup as it moves your data to the cloud and then doesn't necessarily keep copies of past data. So if you change a file accidentally or delete it, it's gone forever.
I do the following. My data is stored on a NAS with 13 drives in two RAID-6 pools. So each pool can tolerate more than one failure. One pool is my primary storage. It is backed up to the other pool. In addition, I have my NAS make immutable snapshots at regular intervals. So if I delete or change a file accidentally, I can recover any version of it from snapshot. And if my primary disk pool fails rendering all snapshots inaccessible, I can steill recover my data locally.
In addition: All my important data is stored on Amazon AWS Glacier. I hope I never need to read from it. The same data is also copied to Backblaze. Every time a file is changed, a new version is created. So that if my house were to be burgled or burn down, I can still retrieve even past copies of important data or things I've deleted.
My Backblaze contains about 25TB and my local NAS, both primary and backup is around 112TB raw, but less available since 4 disks are allocated to parity data.
In your case, you will find it difficult to buy any kind of dedicated NAS for £100. But you could use an old Raspberry Pi with ideally two large disks hung off it, configured in a RAID mirror. That way, all your computers can back up to them. You could use Windows File Backup or you could use Time Machine if you have Mac(s).
But definitely install the Backblaze client on each machine and backup up your computer properly online. That would mean you have three copies of the data, with the raspberry Pi as a NAS.
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