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Recently I lost all my data in a flood. I had two HD’s connected to my router in the kitchen (in the apartment taht was the most covenant place to put it). We had the sink overflow and get about an inch + of water all over the floor destroying both drives.

I have a backup on a server at my parent’s house but it might be missing some data since I never updated it for about a year.

I want to know what systems/devices you use for backup.

Well...I would start by recommending a shelf or a small table

What kind of backup system are you looking for? Something to plug into the network briefly and then store offsite, or just an always-online, mirrored copy in another room?

I back most of my data up to Amazon s3 cloud storage. I also have a lot backed up to skydrive.

Pretty sure I am safe should I lose any physical drives.

Crashplan is what I use.

If your data is important, you must include regularly updated off-site storage. Ideally far enough off-site that it'd take a nuclear war to destroy both copies (i.e., in the same town is bad if your area's prone to flood, earthquakes, tornadoes, or hurricanes).

How you do it depends on how much data's involved. If it's just a few GB, you could put it into a free Google Drive or Dropbox account. If you need more storage you can buy it from them; there's also Crashplan and Carbonite. It wouldn't hurt to make a snapshot on a semi-regular basis onto an external HD and put that into a bank's safe-deposit box. Always test your backups on a regular basis to make sure they're good for when you need them. If they contain sensitive information (tax or health records, say) strongly consider encrypting them.

So you're going to get people who fall into a couple camps on this. Build your own raid server, mirror to another location locally, cloud, etc.

I'm going to throw out what I think is maybe the best security vs. easiness solution (obviously you can build your own box for the best price and hack it to do anything you can dream). My recommendation is getting a Synology NAS. It's pretty much a server that does most everything most people would want at a pretty darn reasonable price and it's dead simple. I bought their $300 two bay system, put a couple drives in it, the drives are automagically set up in a RAID solution that lets me hot-swap either should one die, and perhaps best yet Synology has a one-click install "app store" that takes care of most things you could need. They've a few relatively cheap cloud backup systems built in through a few reputable companies, easy to setup remote access, iOS and Android apps, and you can even use them as a media server. You can also setup automatic backups with both windows and mac machines very easily to the Synology. The list of what they can do out of the box is pretty incredible.

Now Synology units are not as flexible, obviously, as if you built your own box. And not quite as cheap. Your choices will also be somewhat limited in terms of cloud backup providers. But if a drive dies, you just replace it, and at a fraction of the cost of lets say a Drobo. And with all of the functionality you get out of the box you'll be setup with everything you could want, and more, probably the same day it arrives on your doorstep.

xtalentx wrote:

I back most of my data up to Amazon s3 cloud storage. I also have a lot backed up to skydrive.

Pretty sure I am safe should I lose any physical drives.

I took a look at amazon s3. I want about 500GB of backup so I calculated that might cost me about $38/month in data costs. The thing is, I want to be able to read and write constantly to that data. It seems that that comes with an extra expense.

I see amazon s3 Glacier to me an amazing backup for super old files ect.

Thanks so much!

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Crashplan is what I use.

I really like this idea. Load up a computer with a raid 0 (2 * 2TB drive) and have it push it to Crashplan. It's kinda the same as having raid 1 + 0 for a VERY VERY low cost.

Thanks!!!!

You can get 1 year free of unlimited backup on Crashplan right now:

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1758040

mikkroik wrote:

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Crashplan is what I use.

I really like this idea. Load up a computer with a raid 0 (2 * 2TB drive) and have it push it to Crashplan. It's kinda the same as having raid 1 + 0 for a VERY VERY low cost.

Thanks!!!!

NO. NO NO NO.

A backup is only as good as the data that's coming in. If your RAID-0 starts to fail silently (and it's twice as likely to fail as a single drive), corrupting only some of the data, your backup gets corrupted too.

Forget entirely about RAID-0. Buy an SSD and put your operating system & some programs on it, then put your data on the spinning disk.

bthylafh wrote:

mikkroik wrote:

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Crashplan is what I use.

I really like this idea. Load up a computer with a raid 0 (2 * 2TB drive) and have it push it to Crashplan. It's kinda the same as having raid 1 + 0 for a VERY VERY low cost.

Thanks!!!!

NO. NO NO NO.

A backup is only as good as the data that's coming in. If your RAID-0 starts to fail silently (and it's twice as likely to fail as a single drive), corrupting only some of the data, your backup gets corrupted too.

Forget entirely about RAID-0. Buy an SSD and put your operating system & some programs on it, then put your data on the spinning disk.

Grrrr! I do agree, I keep thinking about dropbox where you can see data overtime. So for now a single 2-3TB drive will do.

Kurotetsu wrote:

You can get 1 year free of unlimited backup on Crashplan right now:

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1758040

That is just awesome! I think they made a new customer for life.

Check out the comments here:
http://techreport.com/news/24084/any-re ... p-software

and the thread here:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=75326&hilit=crashplan

I use WHS2011 and Crashplan at home and work - saved my bacon a number of times. I have used Macrium reflect to good affect as well. There are a thousand ways to skin the backup cat, but the important thing is that you do something. It's unfortunate that you lost anything - hopefully anything that isn't at your parents is easily recreated. You could set up a free crashplan mirror with your parents house so you don't lose any more than a few days at worse.

I use Jungle Disk for backups. I do have a external HD that I backup data to, so I don't have to pull so much back down, if I lose a system.

Windows Home Server.

Probably the most brilliant piece of software that MS ever created.

Naturally, they are killing it.

mcnabney wrote:

Windows Home Server.

Probably the most brilliant piece of software that MS ever created.

Naturally, they are killing it.

Your tense is incorrect. They killed it 2 years ago. I still have my WHS V1 running, but I don't use it for backups anymore. Just haven't gotten around to pulling out the old backups off of it.

I use WHS1 + a powershell task to pull data from all other computers every 3 hours.

Then Crashplan backs up the data on the WHS.