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• Reputation: 474 Q&A: 9 0 7 165 13 0 Classifieds: 2 0 what's this? Expert: 2 topics Geek Week Questionland Redesign Moderator Anthony Hecht is a moderator on Questionland Seattle Follow Following 0 Anthony Hecht

  4 0 Well, I'm not sure I qualify as a member of your target group here, but I'll lay it out anyway: At home: Crashplan backs up all my irreplaceable stuff (mostly media, some document, and email) to Crashplan Central and to a drive attached to my work computer. Time Machine backs up whatever to a dedicated Time Machine drive. All my media are on a RAID 5 array, which isn't backup as you say, but has some redundancy. I SuperDuper my boot drive to an external drive every night. I have some random old ChronoSync routines that make additional copies of my photos and music. At work I just SuperDuper and Crashplan. My laptop I TimeMachine when it's on my home network and plugged in, and Crashplan to Crashplan Central. I don't keep anything unique or critical on my laptop, though. Mail is IMAP, calendars and contacts are synced with MobileMe, and I use Dropbox for various files I want to access everywhere. Most important to me in all this is that it's all virtually 100% unattended. I try to take a look every now and then to make sure everything's still running, but otherwise I don't notice it. The downside of course is that I also might not notice if something isn't working until I really need it, but I think I have enough copies of the important stuff to cover me. So yeah, I'm not sane in this regard. It's probably just like yours. Anthony Hecht answered in Geek Week 10 months ago | Report Comment on this answer Enter your comment or ask a new question New comments are not being accepted at this time.

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  2 0 I have a 1.5 Tb drive hooked up to my main machine that does a daily backup of everything using Apple's TimeMachine. I keep my music and movie files on an external portable USB drive, which is also backed up to the big drive every night. My Documents folder (which is far and away the most precious thing on my computer) backups to Mozy every night automatically. I manually backup to DropBox and access my documents with my netbook through DropBox. I also have a couple of thumb drives floating around that I occasionally toss my Documents folder onto. With that setup I have yet to lose anything, including when my Macbook refused to boot and I had to wipe the harddrive and reinstall from scratch. Having the TimeMachine backup made the recovery process utterly painless. Lilting Missive answered in Geek Week 10 months ago | Report Comment on this answer Enter your comment or ask a new question New comments are not being accepted at this time.

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• Reputation: 976 Q&A: 26 0 7 567 256 1 Classifieds: 0 0 what's this? Follow Following 0 protosaurus

  1 0 I have 3 computers I care about. A PC desktop running Windows 7; a headless Linux box running Debian; and a Macbook Pro running OSX. I use the built in backup/restore in Windows 7. It syncs my desktop to a network share that is a RAID1 mirror from the Linux box. The Linux box has 3 drives: an SSD for the OS; a software RAID1 for /home; and a hardware RAID5 for media. A weekly backup of the OS is made onto /home using rsync. While the media is on RAID5 and I have uneventfully lost a drive with this controller, something bad may happen to the array one day. All I really care about on it is the ~100gigs of mp3s. They get rsynced to 3 places -- one that is offsite on another RAID5 array. I don't really have the motivation to backup the 2T of videos that is constantly rotating. The RAID5 controller itself is monitored using command line tools and email. For the laptop, I use an external USB WD Passport drive that is split into 2 partitions. One 320G for Time Machine; and the other 300G of the USB drive is used to backup /home -- where everything I care about lives or is backed up to. A weekly rsync also backs up /home to an offsite location. I keep my iPhone and iPad synced at least weekly so Time Machine picks those up. I keep a dump of my router and wifi AP's settings around in case they ever need to be restored. I encrypt and put important private keys for SSH and VPN onto Dropbox which all 3 machines have clients for. For me to lose any backed up data, 4-6 drives here and 2 drives in another state would all have to fail at the same time. The only part of this setup that needs human interaction is plugging the USB drive into the laptop and clicking 1 button; and plugging the USB drive into the Linux box and running 1 script. I do this about every 10 days. protosaurus answered in Geek Week 10 months ago | Report Comment on this answer Enter your comment or ask a new question New comments are not being accepted at this time.

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  1 0 I'm old fashioned and unautomated - here's my list (Aside from keeping all my old typewriter ribbons, carbons, and all my pencil & paper notepads...) Files copied to a backup laptop (netbook), Cut & paste to an external HD, superimportant docs are in triplicate on various 8 and 16gb usb drives, once yearly I burn data CDs of new docs/music/art/etc. and mail one to a friend. I likewise keep his backup "fire insurance" cds. RacerX answered in Geek Week 10 months ago | Report Comment on this answer Enter your comment or ask a new question New comments are not being accepted at this time.

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• Reputation: 395 Q&A: 8 0 2 208 18 1 Classifieds: 0 0 what's this? Follow Following 0 marymc

  1 0 I use Dropbox for selected files, but that's mostly so I have access to them at work or elsewhere--not really for backup purposes. I use TimeMachine to back up most the contents of my hard drive on an hourly basis. I like having immediate access to those backups, and having multiple versions going back for days and weeks. Those backups go on an external USB drive that's connected to my computer all the time. And in case of a real disaster--my house burns down, a burglar steals everything, etc.--I have a little portable USB drive that I keep at work. Once a month I bring it home overnight and do a backup of everything--100% of my hard drive, a bootable mirror copy--using SuperDuper. And after all that...I still managed to lose some very important files a few months ago. I was new to using Dropbox, and I admit, I was pretty slow on the uptake about how it worked. I put my whole Documents folder there, then decided I didn't want all those files stored in the cloud after all, and moved them back. Somehow in the process I lost some of them--copied one folder and its sub-folders, but the contents didn't get copied with them. I wasn't using TimeMachine then, and I didn't notice the files were gone until I'd done four months of backups of those empty folders to my portable drive--so they weren't backed up anywhere. I got most of the files back eventually, but it took a $99 file recovery program and hours of combing through the 10,000 nameless files it recovered. Moral of the story: You can't be too careful. There are two kinds of computer users--the kind who've lost their data, and the kind who haven't...yet. marymc answered in Geek Week 10 months ago | Report Comment on this answer Enter your comment or ask a new question New comments are not being accepted at this time.

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  0 0 PRAY that's pretty much mine. Black Beetles in Amber answered in Geek Week 10 months ago | Report Comment on this answer Enter your comment or ask a new question New comments are not being accepted at this time.

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  0 0 I used to use Backblaze, and wireless Time Machne backups to a time capsule, in addition to manual monthly clones using Super Duper to a cheap portable HD. But I have moved everything important to the cloud (mostly google docs, picasa and sugarsync, and rdio for my music) and I don't even use a full computer anymore, so backup isn't much of an issue. It's a gamble if a given service goes down, sure, but I don't have much that i'm worried about loosing these days, now that my music collection is available to stream. Brandon Humphries answered in Geek Week 10 months ago | Report Comment on this answer Enter your comment or ask a new question New comments are not being accepted at this time.

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  0 1 It's a difficult question to answer in specific without knowing more about your system and file structure. But in abstract, you want to develop the most streamlined procedure that you can maintain on a regular basis. AND, it's good to regularly store a redundant copy offsite in case of fire, theft etc at your primary site. mister_fusspot answered in Geek Week 10 months ago | Report Comment on this answer Enter your comment or ask a new question New comments are not being accepted at this time.

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