Ask HN: What's your backup solution?
Do you keep work and personal separate? Do you use multiple providers like iCloud/OneDrive/Dropbox/Google Drive or do you stick to one? Do you do any type of auto-sync folders?
What's your process like? I'm curious on what people to find the most automatic and reliable solution for typical day to day with photos, documents, and their work backups. (Thinking more along the lines of your own side projects or things that you're more in control of, less on the corporate side that have imposed solutions and is managed by a team).
155 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadFor company sync/backup, we use AeroFS [3].
[1] https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13000024 [3] https://aerofs.com/
S3 and google drive.
Dropbox for non sensitive stuff and spideroak for complete PC backup.
2. Periodically: duplicity to Oracle archive storage (7x cheaper than AWS Glacier - $0.001)
I hate to loose any file even if its not important :) I still have files from the floppy disk era.
I'd like to keep my laptop files backed up automatically.
However, if you end up doing this, it's a pretty bad idea to use your account for anything else but backups. Especially Amazon's Cloud Drive. And I also can't speak for how durable the stored data is and it's a good idea if important data is backed up in two places.
I don't work.
Git + bloom filters + Python
I backup hundreds of thousands of user accounts at cloud.sagemath.com using it, plus my own data, etc. I've been using it for four years and haven't found anything better for my requirements.
bup does have a huge advantage of deduplicating multiple machine images that can backup simulatenously. With Borg, there is a lock held on the repository (only one machine at a time), and if multiple machines do use the same repository, they will need to download the indices (Slow compared to bup's bloom filter), or use sshfs etc (slow)
borg also has internal encryption. If only borg adopts bup's bloom filters and concurrent access, it will only have advantages...
My music collection sits on a server hooked up to my stereo. I had the disks in RAID-Z1, but when one of the disks pulled a Seagate I accidentally made the disks striped vedvs. To back this up, I boot up a rackmount server with larger disks in RAID-Z1 and use rsync.
This is the only data that I really care about preserving. I found this out through changing my operating system a lot and having my laptop stolen.
My biggest concern with deleting them would be forgetting about music that I previously liked. Seems like running `find` on my music directory would solve that.
Then again, with 30-40GB, I could just stick it all on a couple SD cards (for redundancy) and ignore them in a drawer.
Unsure about Spotify - but Google Music allows you to upload your own collection as well.
In the past, I have used rdiff-backup and tarsnap.
Work stuff also goes on an LTO tape. I guess we are just traditionalists at heart.
Probably overkill, but if one backup method ever has a flaw I'm still fine.
Yeah.. I was about to say. LOL. Have you even been in a situation where you had to restore?
I'm picky about backups and have never had an issue where files were permanently lost. I'm to the point now where if I'm not sure I want a file I'll go ahead and delete it, and then if I need it later I restore from the Back In Time snapshot.
Storage is dirt cheap, so spend the time up front getting your backup 'idiot proof' and automatic and it's totally worth it in the long term.
https://gitlab.paivola.fi/tech/pvl-backup
(they're a lot more efficient than lvm snapshots. One machine I use took snapshots every half hour, and we accidentally filled it up with >3000 snapshots before anyone noticed that the reaper script for old snapshots wasn't running :-P . No performance degradation!)
[1] http://rclone.org/
However be warned, their client is a Java application and the more files and terabytes you want to backup, the more ram it takes.
For example, I backup about 3 terabytes on a server and it takes 3+ GB of constant ram usage to do this.
https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Troubleshooting/Adjus...
I thought they had fixed this by now.
I suspect it's related to the huge amount of files in average js projects, eventhough i'm now excluding node_modules/ from backing up. I've also spent quite some time with CP support to debug the issue but without any result.
Nonetheless, I don't trust CP anymore to backup all my files. I've actually needed access to files in the past and wasn't able to find them.
If I had that problem I'd include a huge tar of everything in the file set. Or go to backblaze.
/r/datahoarders have a long list of horror stories about that. Admittedly, these guys operate in TBs, but the general feeling on the sub towards CrashPlan is to avoid it at all costs (no pun intended).
My requirements are pretty simple: has to work well on windows + mac, has to be cloud based, have decent bandwidth, unlimited storage, unlimited retention, and has to and require no configuration of my own apart from selecting files and schedules.
I just haven't found anything with the level of polish that CrashPlan has in terms of UI and usability. To avoid having all eggs in one basket I try to keep at least a mirror of everything too, e.g. on a NAS.
I have been a DataHoarder kind of guy in the past (dabbled with my own backup scripts, etc.) but found that the chance of user error on my part is probably an order of magnitude greater than the risk of losing data any other way - and with user error there is always the risk that you also bork your backups. So I don't want any system that has any kind of complex configuration on my part.
Further, I don't want to separate the storage from the backup, simply because buying unlimited cloud storage is to expensive. I don't need fast random access storage, I need something cheap like glacier, but that quickly becomes comples. So I'm very happy to hide that complexity behind a cloud backup provider that gives unlimited retention and storage.