After many years of promising myself that I'll backup data properly next week, and a few half hearted efforts amidst losing data, I'm finally making progress. Or at least I've bought another hard drive, which feels like the same thing.
My intention here is to describe how I'm attempting to backup data, which may be helpful to other people. With luck other people will post their ideas too. I've searched the forums for something similar, and it was the many "my raid 0 has died, and I have no backup" threads which provide the motivation for this.
I am fortunate in that all my data will fit onto a single 2tb hard drive comfortably (700gb free). So I am currently organising incremental backups for myself and the girlfriend to a 2tb NAS using rsnapshot. At present this is intended to cover our Documents folders, as being able to go back to a version of a report from three hours ago sounds like a useful feature. I believe this will require Cygwin.
I also have 500gb or so of relatively static data which I'm happy to keep a copy of without incremental changes, so this resides in a folder called Data on the same NAS.
Finally there is a Dropbox folder, which holds the current version of whatever work I am doing at the moment. ADSL bandwidth limits, along with the 2gb limit for a free account, mean this is pretty much restricted to shared group projects and my CV. The website includes a considerably more elegant versioning system than rsnapshot which I have no idea how to implement at home.
A 2tb external hard drive will get here in a few days, I intend to synchronise this with the NAS on a weekly basis and leave it in a draw the rest of the time. The NAS dying would otherwise be rather devastating.
My rambling is over at last, please share your strategy. Thanks
My intention here is to describe how I'm attempting to backup data, which may be helpful to other people. With luck other people will post their ideas too. I've searched the forums for something similar, and it was the many "my raid 0 has died, and I have no backup" threads which provide the motivation for this.
I am fortunate in that all my data will fit onto a single 2tb hard drive comfortably (700gb free). So I am currently organising incremental backups for myself and the girlfriend to a 2tb NAS using rsnapshot. At present this is intended to cover our Documents folders, as being able to go back to a version of a report from three hours ago sounds like a useful feature. I believe this will require Cygwin.
I also have 500gb or so of relatively static data which I'm happy to keep a copy of without incremental changes, so this resides in a folder called Data on the same NAS.
Finally there is a Dropbox folder, which holds the current version of whatever work I am doing at the moment. ADSL bandwidth limits, along with the 2gb limit for a free account, mean this is pretty much restricted to shared group projects and my CV. The website includes a considerably more elegant versioning system than rsnapshot which I have no idea how to implement at home.
A 2tb external hard drive will get here in a few days, I intend to synchronise this with the NAS on a weekly basis and leave it in a draw the rest of the time. The NAS dying would otherwise be rather devastating.
My rambling is over at last, please share your strategy. Thanks
