Poll: How do you backup your backups? (Poll please!)

How do you backup your backups?


  • Total voters
    53
Joined
10 May 2004
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12,831
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Sunny Stafford
All my important docs on my laptop are replicated onto a NAS box under the stairs. That's got a 2 drives which replicate each other, so I can afford 2 drives to fail before I really start to panic.

Likewise :) A NAS box with mirrored drives in an alcove/annexed part of my lounge under the coffee table, along with UPS + router.

What do people actually back up?

Drive D:
- Music
- My Docs folder
- Pictures
- Personal / hobby / crafts stuff
- Emails
- Tech folder
- Portable apps
- Temp folder

There is nothing of importance on drive C: and Windows settings (wallpaper, colour scheme etc) are tied in with my Microsoft account.

For backup-of-a-backup, my laptop has a copy of drive D: (normally less than 4-6 weeks old) which lives in my backpack and my backpack goes everywhere with me.
 
Soldato
Joined
14 Jul 2003
Posts
14,497
PC>NAS>Cloud (multiple vendors depending on content)
and
PC>local encrypted HDDs kept in a drawer

Mainly back up family photos (scanned in several thousand of my grandparents and parents photos), documents, config files, projects etc.
Locally I have backups of the DVD rips etc I've taken so I could shove our CD/DVDs into the loft and serve from the NAS.
 
Last edited:
Associate
Joined
14 Dec 2002
Posts
2,365
Quite topical as I've only recently properly thought about and improved my approach to how I deal with backups.

I use the OneDrive as my main source of file management, so I can access/sync between all of my devices (including my phone and my wife's phone, for camera upload). My two laptops are set to store the files locally as well, so they are on the devices, as well as the cloud. I then take regular backups of my entire OneDrive folder and put them on a 2 bay mirrored NAS, keeping as many as I can until I have to delete the oldest for a new backup to go on there. Every now and then (but not very often) I'll also take a completely offline/unconnected backup to an old external drive, mainly because I have a spare one laying around. Pretty much covers any (remotely feasible) scenario (component failure, device failure, losing a device, OneDrive gets hacked, house burns down). I guess without a properly disconnected/offline backup, a really sophisticated ransomware attack could (in theory) encrypt all of my drives, including the OneDrive and my NAS... but I'd potentially have a powered down laptop with a relatively recent version of the data in tact... but not very likely to happen, I suspect.

P.S. The reason I use OneDrive as my file management and my NAS for backups and not the other way around is because I want to be able to easily access my files from outside the house sometimes. And I trust Microsoft more when it comes to network security than I do the likes of Synology/QNAP and therefore don't want to (and do not) expose my NAS to the internet.

Oh, and all of my laptop drives, external drives and the NAS drives have full disk encryption activated. Mitigates laptop being stolen or home broken into and a device/drive being stolen.
 
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Soldato
Joined
17 Jul 2005
Posts
9,688
What do people actually back up? I don’t think I have any electronic documents I really need to worry about losing.
A few pictures would be a shame I guess but beyond that I don’t back anything up.
Anything relatively important (mortgage docs for example) are in emails.

Pictures that we can never replace and Documents/Projects etc that would be a pain in the rear to recreate.

Backup wise It's PC/Laptop (Onedrive) with synced NAS backup alongside the NAS for important documents (nothing saved locally on PC's that isn't also on Onedrive) with overnight backup. Also do weekly backups to a separate Drive and monthly backups to a drive that resides offsite.
 
Associate
Joined
14 Dec 2002
Posts
2,365
What do people actually back up? I don’t think I have any electronic documents I really need to worry about losing.
A few pictures would be a shame I guess but beyond that I don’t back anything up.
Anything relatively important (mortgage docs for example) are in emails.


120GB of family photos, including pretty much every photo ever taken of our two children, wedding photos, holiday pics etc. My wife would kill me if I lost them all... :cry:
 
Associate
Joined
23 Dec 2015
Posts
79
I backup my primary data to my backup server which unfortunately is also at my house, but then to to the cloud. My VM's and photos are also sent to an immutable S3 bucket.
40TB local, and around 2-3TB in the cloud.
I use Veeam for VM backups to lackblaze S3 which is cheap for the amount of traffic Veaam sends. Cyberduck +backblaze S3 for the odd file i want archived


I work in backup and data recovery :)
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
22 Oct 2005
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2,802
Location
Moving...
Cloud is certainly the more convenient option. But the security aspect of it does concern me. It's also quite pricey if you need a lot of storage. I've got a few hundred GB of photos I'd want to backup.

I thinks I'm leaning towards a hard drive stored at my parents up the road. Then I just have to remember to update it a couple of times a year.
 
Soldato
Joined
18 Aug 2007
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9,710
Location
Liverpool
Local machines > NAS > automatic nightly differential backup to 2TB cloud using rclone crypt. My cloud storage looks like random numbers and letters unless you further mount it with rclone and the correct passwords locally in a file manager.
 
I haz 4090!
Don
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
8,008
Location
Manchester
I don't. I have a few things in OneDrive but that's more for the convenience of easily being able to access them on multiple devices, not for any form of redundancy. There isn't anything on my PC that I'd be bothered about losing if the drive died tomorrow.
 
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