What do YOU backup?

[Adzsask]

C drive, pictures, few videos, music, steam.

[Chasingu]

My Libraries
Fraps
Recovery
System Volume Information
The USER's folder.

So pretty much everything besides Windows itself and the Program Files.

[NyteOwl]

Backup has always been a "big deal". As has been said often before "data you don't have at elast two copies of is data you don't care about".

I backup:

Documents, contact lists, photographs, original artwork, website layouts I designed, music, e-mail, articles that I keep rteference copies of, passwords, personal databases, code, configuration settings - probably a few more things as well.

There is for each the working copy, the live backup, the encrypted on-site backup the encrypted off-site backup. Some is also backed up in storage such as Dropbox but it is only non-critical material I have encrypted before using the service and have other copies of anyway.

[Chareon]

I've got my truly important files on my storage server as well as backed up to an external drive, and usually in the cloud somewhere.

However lately I've been considering backing up all my files on my storage server, the only issue really is cost/method. Anyone have any thoughts on software if I were to go with a second server running more HDDs? Any thoughts on LTO tape drives? Which obviously have their own advantages and disadvantages. Any other comments?

[Paul_tech]

I back up all my data to ftp server using Handy Backup 7.

[frontier204]

Do whatever works for YOU - it may take some experimentation to figure out how you want to back up. Remember your goal is to simply have more than 1 copy of your data, such that it is unlikely to have both copies destroyed at the same time.
I have a relatively intricate system that has me back up things at different rates depending on size / how much I use it:

• My Dropbox (<500MB, stores my notes and some research-related goodies): Backed up every day by automatic script to my home server which is NOT cloud synced. The script keeps 1 week's worth of these backups.
• School work (<200MB): I always have a copy on both my USB key and my home computer. The home computer copy is the backup. I use Unison <http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/> to do the synchronization as it's cross-platform.
• Other documents, saved games (2-5GB): Backed up once a week by automatic script to my home server. This includes the local copy of my school work, so in essence I have 3 copies of my school work.
• All the stuff on my home server, including pictures, videos, Steam downloads, other installers (>70GB): Backed up once a month to an external hard drive. I'd love to automate this part but the external HDD can't plug itself in

EDIT: I used to keep image backups of my computer, but my Windows install is so messed up from switching between a GeForce 7900GS, Radeon 4870, GeForce 550Ti, and Radeon 3650 that if my main OS has a dump I'll just reinstall manually

Compared to a lot of people here, I'm able to do this using "only" two 1.5TB drives (no RAID). One copy of all my stuff fortunately takes up less than 100GB.


My files backup is performed by Cobian Backup on Windows and fwbackups on Linux, depending on the OS the files are stored on. I'm OK keeping track of all of this (essentially all but that last one is automatic).

Remember that Dropbox is NOT a backup solution if you use the desktop application. If your account gets hacked and all the files are corrupted/deleted, the desktop app will happily sync and mess up your local copy as well. Also, if your computer gets a virus, the infected copies will be sent back up to your web copy. The same goes for Windows Live Skydrive if you have automatic sync (e.g. with Windows 8 or Windows Live Mesh if that thing still works).

[Chareon]

Hmm, I took a look at Cobian Backup, but unfortunately it doesn't really look like its aimed at what I'm trying to do. (Nothing for backing up over the network.) If I go with the backup to HDD solution, I'll build a new box for it. As for tapes, that could easily go in my existing server, but it doesn't look like Cobian supports tapes.

A bit of poking around turned up Duplicati, has anyone used it before? Any comments on it?

[tyreman]

I backup full images every few days or before strange things etc
Keep separate drive with "C" image and separate usb sticks with pics etc.