Work laptop just had a hard drive failure. Not easily recovered, and the company doesn’t automatically back up workstations.
Lucky for me I started doing backups a couple of months ago. I did a convoluted system that involved rsync, ssh tunnels, and cygwin, and now I’m glad I did.
All my systems are Apple computers at the moment so I have them backing up hourly to external drives via Time Machine. I would do the same thing using Windows built-in backup utility on such systems and rsync on any other system.
From there I swap backup drives between home and work weekly. I also swap drives between my hope and my parent’s place whenever I visit them. Both strategies serve as my off-site backups.
Saving nuclear war I think my strategy is pretty solid and if we are in the midst of nuclear war my data is going to be the last of my concerns.
Windows Home Server backs up my entire network every night. Not quite as fancy-pants as Time Machine’s hourly deal, but very handy. It has 1 x 1.5T and 2 x 2.0T drives, so it duplicates data between them as a software-RAID. Works like a charm, includes recovery disks with system-specific driver files, so if you need some funky SCSI drive driver or similar, it has it for you.
Was also useful for upgrading my wife’s laptop hard drive. I backed it up, swapped drives, then “restored” it to the new drive – with a suitable increase to the partition.
I keep my work stuff on a harddrive. Also back up all of my photos onto a separate harddrive.
Beyond that… I’m pretty computer illiterate.
I rsync about once a week to an external 1.5 TB harddrive, more often if I make any significant changes or before installing updates. I need to get a second one to backup my backup, but I do have certain critical data saved to USB sticks, too. About once a month or so I image the computer’s drives (the important partitions, at least) to it as well (yet another reason to keep a second backup).
Offsite backups are probably not feasible for me at the moment, but would be good for critical data.
CrashPlan – a great service that provides all the functionality a home power user needs. It has Win, Mac, and Linux clients. Allows pre-transmission encryption*, block based real time uploading, customizable versioning of your files, backup to both das cloud (cheap, unlimited space) and an arbitrary folder, and the restore is dead simple. Easy to set up the 3/2/1/0 scheme (3 backups on at least 2 media types with 1 off sight and 0 actions needed by the user).
The price is right. The customer service is responsive.
I could do it all myself, but my time is money and I couldn’t do it quicker than they can do it cheap.
http://www.crashplan.com/
I’m not related to this company at all, except as a customer.
*They have 3 different schemes, including one where you only send cipher text and you never disclose any keys to anyone.