4 bay esata external hard drive enclosure. 4 truecrypted 3.5 inch hard drives and a single 2.5 inch hard drive (2.5 inch for carrying with me day to day). Incremental backup once a week. Rent a seedbox. Encrypt and dropbox anything absolutely critical.

Unlike most people, i like to have my movies, music and tv shows backed up which requires this setup. I spent a lot of time grabbing all that stuff and don’t have to hunt for and wrangle it all together again.

NAS solution doesn’t work for me since I’m on the move occasionally.

Sounds like you’ve got a pretty good regimen in case of hard drive failure. A four drive backup is exactly the kind of things that we tell our customers to do, but you can almost hear their eyes rolling in their head when they hear this.

The cloud backups are now so easy to use that I don’t understand why people aren’t using them on a mass basis. It saves expensive data recovery service charges in the long run, believe me! ;)

…datastorageunit.com actually seems to be exactly what I was looking for before settling on EC2. Why couldn’t I find that before?!

For starters I have my Documents and project (mostly programming) folders on Dropbox, but that’s mostly for historical reasons. I actually almost lost some data (managed to restore from another source) once due to some failed Dropbox syncing, so I very much do not trust it for backups.

Now, all my backups are handled on my Debian server. It has a samba share which I use to store everything important, which is synced to another drive several times a day using rsnapshot. It’s an awesome rsync-based tool which, apart from just backups, also gives me several points in time to go back to without using any significant amount of extra space. I also sync my Dropbox folder to the server so it gets backed up aswell.

On top of this I also have an old external 320GB LaCie drive connected to the server, to which a subset of data deemed important enough (mostly stuff that’s hard or impossible to reproduce) is synced every night. I consider this a black box of sorts, something I can grab if the house is on fire, or take with me when I leave town for more than a few days. Just in case.

For off-site backup I use Amazon EC2. I have small Linux instance with, currently, a 50GB EBS drive attached. I’m a bit paranoid about storing my data off-site though, so naturally it’s encrypted. On semi-regular intervals I mount an encfs filesystem on a local “staging” drive and sync my super-important data to it, followed by running a script to start my EC2 instance, sync the encrypted data to it, and stop it.

I’ve often considered getting some sort of storage device I can always carry, preferrably in my wallet, but have yet to find anything convenient and not really expensive with enough space to make it worthwhile. Granted, I’ve never really looked *that* hard. Maybe I will now.

Regarding bare metal restores, since I don’t really store anything important on my clients the only real concern is reinstalling the OS. For that I have a Debian server that handles PXE bootup and netinstalling Windows 7, which is my client OS of choice.

Picasa, Google Drive, Google Music, and the Android/Chrome bookmarks that sync up so I don’t lose them all again. That covers my off-site, and availability on my phone/tablet/laptop.

I have two external drives, one of which is about ten years old and still plugging along, though it’s slow as hell, planning to get a 1TB Passport Essential USB 3.0 and the Nomad case soon for my in the safe backup and occasional SneakerNet needs.

Also getting a Tonido Plug for backup and streaming purposes. From what I gather that should work with the Roku, GoogleTV, PS3, phone, tablet, and multiple OSes on desk/laptop computers.

Additional backups go on the MicroSDHC cards, 32GB for under $20 and small enough to fit several in a credit card slot, and I have a Corsair Flash Survivor for the whole run over by a Jeep and still works rugged storage, though I need to replace it now that they have 32GB USB 3.0 versions for $37.

The only problem I have is that I still haven’t taken the time to set up any automatic backups so all of that is done manually. I’ll do it someday, but it seems that anything I find that works well on WIN7 sucks on Linux, and all the pretty toys for Linux are not available for Windows.

I have this little script called dbup.sh which is executed daily. It calls bup.sh (creates backups in .tar format), copies .tar files to ~/Dropbox/bup/, removes over two revisions old backups and executes dboxsync (syncs my dropbox). It has worked pretty well as my backups are just 180MB in size.

I guess I am old school. Yep, I actually use tape at home. I can’t tell you how often I have had to dig up a ten to fifteen year old tape to recover data at my job. As long as you keep it in a magnetic field free environment, it should be able to reliably keep your data safe for half a century. There is only one trick to this, keeping a device that will be able to recover that data later. Tape drives can stay operational in cold storage for long periods of time as well, unlike traditional disk drives. The only problem I am starting to se e is the evolution of the communication path. SCSI used to rule and was pretty much backward compatible (lets ignore that thing call high voltage differential)@ Craig A. Betts:

I have 50GB Dropbox plan which is also at 3 of my computers at a time. Also, I backup my work files with Amazon S3 via Arq but that is still free because there’s not much space occupied. I back up my Macbook Air with Time Machine to external drive and I have a 2TB NAS which works as 1TB mirror drive in my home network where everything else is backed up again. I also keep my photos in private sets on Flickr ‘just in case’ but there’s nothing important there.

I also got into practice of using Bitbucket for my own projects, again, ‘to be on the safe side’. All of this means that I’m screwed if there’s no internet connection :)

In recent years, I’ve had 3 hard drive failures. Of which one was the backup drive which failed four days after my media drive did. In short, I lost all my music, movies and whatnot twice and I’ve learned to live with it. All the data that’s really important to me is located on Dropbox, Google Drive, SendIt or whatever.

I always think: will I need this data in three months? Yes: put it online. No: just put it on that disk you’ve got lying there.

Simple but so far it worked:
All the pictures/videos are copied manually on 1 external drive, 1 home file server and my laptop (always do that before erasing card).
Personal work (programming, etc) – tgz that goes on external drive, home server and another server that I keep at work (I have an understanding to keep one small personal server here)
The rest (documents, mails, settings, etc) – iBackup on external drive.

Went thru 2 laptop hdd crashes and 1 external hdd crash; nothing important lost so far.