Data back ups

Marcus_Aurelius

Marcus_Aurelius

Marcus_Aurelius

Associate
Joined
17 May 2020
Posts
5
Afternoon, chaps

Hope you're all well

I have a question, or should I say, I want to get opinions on the best method of backing up data.

I've moved over to Windows again after years on Mac.

I've got data on my hard drive that I need to back up and I have data on a USB stick that needs backing up periodically - i usually back it up to my hard drive (literally copying it over).

I am worried about losing all my data through system failure/corruption. I usually write my lectures and put them on my pen drive, then every now and again copy them on to my hard drive - there are literally years of lectures on there, that I don't want to lose.

What's the best method for [basically] backing up data?

I'm not a huge fan of google drive and back up and sync, I found it clumsy and if I am honest, I am not a huge fan of having my data on a cloud-based platform.

Colleagues are absolutely clueless on this issue, so I thought I'd ask people in the know.

I've seen Storage Spaces mentioned - and that appeals?

Cheers :)
 
Have two external hard drives of a sensible size/according to what you are happy to spend/what you actually need

Keep your data on PC hard drive plus a copy on each of the external drives....that way you will always have 3 copies of all the data.

Keep one drive unplugged from PC except for when backing up...some nasty malware can encrypt all your data on all connected drive (inc networked)

Set file history to run on the other drive so that will do auto backups to keep things up to date should there be long gaps between your manual backups.

Check from time to time that file history is working fine...usually does :)
 
Cheers

I'll go for a decent external HDD and back up periodically, I thought that was the best route, but I was being overly cautious - I've got, as I've said, years of work stuff and personal stuff on my PC that I don't want to lose

I appreciate your advice!

All the best.
 
beh said:
The File history feature in Windows is pretty seamless once set up.

Veeam Agent is also very impressive for free and easy to configure - https://www.veeam.com/windows-endpoint-server-backup-free.html

How much data do you have to backup?
Click to expand...

100Gb including all my old travelling videos and photos etc.

But that increases week on week as my lectures (especially at this time) are full of embedded videos etc.

It's just me being a neat freak - i like to know that my data is secure and that any addition to my stuff isn't lost between the cracks.

Teachers and academics are abysmal at data organisation and security - something i am trying to learn about and improve on.
 
Macrium reflect + an external drive (I use a 2TB NAS), you can schedule daily / weekly / monthly backups, and can backup full drives as an ISO if needed. I started using it a while ago and love it, very easy to get up and running :)
 
Have you confirmed that you can't get some sort of free service from your association with an acedemic institution? I know Microsoft do this/used to do this, so you could save yourself some money and effort there.

If you're going to go after a solution yourself, it's worth bearing in mind that it really isn't a great amount of data, especially if that's what's built up over years. I understand your apprehension about cloud providers but the chances are you're already using Office, so I'd get Office 365 and use the 1TB onedrive storage space you'll get along with that. I'd still use Macrium every now and again to get an ISO on an external drive, but that'd be more for a smooth recovery medium rather that an actual backup. It's also piece of mind if for some reason the cloud provider became unavailable.

I'd you're a neat freak, you really won't mind paying a few quid a month to know that your data is secure. If you don't want your data lost between the cracks as you say, how often will you perform the backup... nightly? Hourly...? See where I'm going? The price of a nice smooth cloud solution is worth it for that alone. It's also useful as you can use it as a sort of dumping ground for big temporary files you might need to work on between systems such as your phone/laptop/work PC/home PC.
 
Aye, if you're a lecturer wherever you work probably has the educational edition of gsuite or office365 (or both) with unlimited/1tb storage.
 
Storage spaces is useful and quite versatile and very resilient
But should only be 1 part of your back up
Strategy
As mentioned macrium is very good but I have had macrium images fail to load
Due to windows newer versions /updates
Altering something that meant the earlier macrium image wouldn't work
For very important stuff multiple backup to different mediums is important
Including ones that can be turned off /disconnected from the system except when doing backups
 
Amazon Galcier Deep Archive.

---

The above comment was me being ridiculous :p but now having read the OPs original post using AWS or another cloud provider for data backup isn't so ridiculous.
 
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Marcus_Aurelius said:
What's the best method for [basically] backing up data?
Click to expand...


How much are you prepared to spend? There are assorted cloud backup solutions, but what I have is a Windows Server Essentials 2016 server which backs up every night to RAID 1 drives. The server is then backed up to an external USB drive. I also periodically take a copy of the data on this PC on an external USB drive.
 
If you don't want to use a cloud backup then I would just look at it like so;

A) Original copy of data, all sorted and filed how you wish.
B) External hard drive, use Macrium Reflect (great software) you can just point at A and schedule to copy to B.
C) I would then have another external drive, potentially even a Samsung T5 as its super small and fast. Make a quarterly/monthly backup of B and store this elsewhere if possible.

Keep A and B in your home, keep C offsite. Backups are worth nothing if anything ever happened to your house.

In all honesty, depending on the size of the data I would also do a yearly dump of the data into a cloud platform. Just for that extra peace of mind that if the worse ever happened you haven't lost everything.
 
Good morning

Thanks for the advice

I'm now using File History with an external HDD - it works a treat, so thank you

At the moment I am just copying the contents of my USB pendrive to my HDD and then backing up the HDD periodically using File Transfer to my external drive.

Is there a way of scheduling or creating a process to automate the copying of the contents of my Pendrive to my HDD periodically?

Due to my work my pendrive has to be bitlocker encrypted

Cheers
 
I use Amazon Glacier to backup 100GB of photos from my NAS. Costs me less than £1 per month....
 
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