Let's survey again - How are you backing-up at home

What strategies is everyone using to prevent data loss

[Mr Bo Jangles]

Probably everyone by now has suffered at least one really painful data loss, so what is everone's strategy at home to avoid against data loss, to avoid a week's work of reloading applications, etc.

Who runs 2 computers and syncs everything so that if there's trouble with one, you're still in business with the other.

Who uses Ghost, and how?

What else - what are the smart and cheap(er) strategies.

[emodo]

I bought an 160gb internal HD for $30 and an waterproof enclosure case for it.

[stever]

External hard drive (80GB) set up to synchronize certain folders daily.

[steve]

Ghost 2003 to an external hdd every few days, and to dvd every once in a while.

[mcavic]

I have a file server with two 250 gig drives. My workstation backs up nightly to the server, and the server mirrors itself to the second drive. My (remote) web server also backs up to the file server using rsync.

I've thought about making one of the drives removable in case of fire. I have some memorabilia going back to 1992, and I've really never had a disaster on my own machines, though my older files are totally disorganized now.

[wheel]

I rsync my webserver (offsite), and my two computers here to a server in the basement. The server has a couple of scsi drives and a dvd burner. One scsi drive has 'last night's backup' from all three machines. The second contains a weeks worth of zipped files from the first scsi drive. (so drive A has backup, drive B is more for archive).

I burn a dvd once a week of the most recent archive.

I did a post in the beginners forum a few months ago with my full instructions on how I set this up.

[bill]

Is this the one wheel?
Backup up your webserver to your home computer. [webmasterworld.com]

At home I stagger Drive Images of my OS and Programs, but I make nightly backups of work files. I FTP these backups to a remote server. I also have a removable firewire HDD to which I copy backups to every week or so.

At the office I also use Ghost to do regular backups of my workstation, but there I have a large network where I can deposit backups into servers in different geographic locations.

I think the key is not only to make the backup image, but to get it to a location where that data won't be lost if something serious happens to the machine being backed up. I'm not just talking about HDD failure, but earthquakes (get a lot of them), fire, floods, etc. At least I try to keep my backups in another building, if not another country.

[dbar]

This may or may not be a good solution, but I have been using a Quicken Software backup service (they outsource it to some company) which automatically uploads an encryped backup of selected files to an offsite location. I probably pay too much but I don't care. For whatever it's worth it gives me some peace of mind.

[MatthewHSE]

I've never had a painful data loss, but I've had some very scary moments when I thought I was about to have a painful data loss! That was enough for me; we set up a mirrored raid-array for all our important data, and have scheduled nightly backups via Norton Ghost to external LAN hard drives. Both hard drives aren't likely to go bad all at once, but if they did, we still have the external backup (which can also be quickly unplugged and taken to safety in case of fire, flood, tornado, etc.)

I occasionally backup the most vital files to my USB flash drive, too.

[Code Sentinel]

I used to do backups of work files manually, got lazy and set up DOS batch files to archive into a multi-volime rar(to preserve long file names) with a decent amount of recovery volumes(similar to par files), then had this single backup folder which had the archives of everything web/email related burned to cdrw sitting in the drive through command line burning program through the same dos batch file.

This is run every night at 6am with windows scheduler so always have a recent backup on cdrw.. although the only catastrophe I'm guarding against with this setup is HD failure. This also assumes non dynamic data so just local copies of websites are sufficient(editing directly on the server is just asking for trouble).

I suppose I can toss in a cron job and php script in addition to an ftp server on my home machine to get database dumps from the web server to add to this batch file cdrw burn.

I'd prefer raid5 and offsite backup using rsync in addition to this method, but somewhat expensive. Will probably end up just getting a mirror drive or something so I can backup everything including OS.