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what are you using for back-up?
as per the title..
looking for recommendations please.
I forget which I used to have but it would take all selected folders and automatically back them up to an external HD overnight each day. Having a raid set-up I’ve got lazy but want to go back to keeping a self updating back-up, partly due to looking to buy a new pc tower in the coming weeks.
I don’t really want cloud, not when I’ve got some 350-400gb of files I want to keep backed up, though I guess I can keep the most important backed up on cloud also.
thanks in advance,
Hugh -
16 Replies
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I use Knowhow Cloud
5 year online for 130.00 and gives me 4TBHas a folder which is shared between pc’s and can view files while I am out. (often handy when I forgot vehicle layouts)
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I like the sound of that. Currently we are using external 3TB drives to back up our main server but it doesn’t give you that accessibility you get from cloud storage.
What has stopped me going the cloud route up till now is the thought of what happens if they lose your data, or what happens if that company goes bust?
So I would probably end up with a cloud account and a physical back up drive. I suppose you could have the two systems running like that. Everything is so complicated these days!
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that also gets be back up for all 3 pc’s and mobile photos
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Ive literally yesterday upgraded to dropbox plus. Its perfect for me and im in the process of backing up 20 years of files. Its going to take a bit of time but once done i will work on flexi in dropbox so everything is always up to date and saved. The option i took gives me 1T of space. Still downloading but more than half way there and used apx 3%
Cost for the year was £79.00 i think -
Turned an old PC into a NAS RAID system.
Powered by Freenas ( http://www.freenas.org/ ) from a USB stick, with the RAID setup it gives us 4TB storage using low energy Green drives, they were the only real cost.
Great setup, all files are saved to the server now, not on PC.
As for accessing the server remotely – yes totally possible, I can access server from my house with ease.
Yes, I know the building can burn down etc and we’d loose the server, but don’t like cloud servers to much, being in deep countryside the broadband speed can fluctuate very heavily. (but we do back mobile phone pictures etc to the Apple cloud). -
Our set up is a little overkill but fits our needs:
1 Dell Power Edge Server, with 2 1TB Hard Drives, I’ve configured as a RAID1 array, running Ubuntu Server. It acts as our file server, and also as a VPN server, so I can work from home.
As a back up we use Rsnapshot, which backs up all the server config files, and the homes directory, taking hourly, daily, weekly & monthly backups, we swap the disk in the hot drive every few days, so the most we will loose is 1-2 days worth of work.
I have inadvertently deleted everything from the server, and had it restored overnight.
The cloud is great, but for the size of the files and amount of data we have it’ll take ages, and cost a small fortune… being a bit nerdy it was a project with a purpose.
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If you’ve designed an efficient filing system you shouldn’t have to keep on backing up everything – just the more recent work that isn’t already backed up. That’s why I advocate a filing system whereby you save work in monthly folders – that way you only have to keep backing up the current month.
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Our filing system is a more modern version my uncle & dad used for 30+ Years.
Every job got a ‘job sheet’ with a job number, and filed in the filing cabinet by job number, using an index card, each customer had a card, and a brief date, description, job no. When a customer rang pop to the filing cabinet find the job sheet.
Now we’re more electronic, clarity creates a job number and folder on the server, and we store these in year folders. Only printing physical job sheets off when there’s a sample or swatch to retain, the rest is stored electronically.
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I currently have a 4tb WD ‘Mycloud’ external drive and use MyBackup software.
The drive is effectively a NAS drive where I can create shares and user accounts allowing me to restrict access to any part of the drive for different users.
All of the shares can then be mapped to individual network drives on the PC’s. It is also connected to the Western Digital servers and automatically copies everything from the drive to my personal ‘cloud’ space on their server. This cloud space is accessible from any PC with web browser and internet connection.My backups are run by 1 PC in the early hours of the morning. I divide backups into things like ‘Work’, ‘Documentation’, ‘Custom work’, ‘Cut files’ etc.
It runs a full backup the 1st of every month and then an incremental backup (only new, or modified files from the previous full backup) every night.If the drive were to fail, I can just buy a new one, connect it to my network, log on to my cloud space and it will copy everything back down to the new drive.
And hopefully, Western Digital won’t go bust so my data should be safe for now.
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:smiles: Im still using floppy disks.
Not far from it tho, once a month backup onto flash drive but soon will second that with external hard drive -
I use Backblaze. Costs about £4 a month per machine for constant and unlimited backups
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Does the WD server space come included with the drive, or is this an extra? Just looking into some options
for our backups.quote Peter Johnson:I currently have a 4tb WD ‘Mycloud’ external drive and use MyBackup software.The drive is effectively a NAS drive where I can create shares and user accounts allowing me to restrict access to any part of the drive for different users.
All of the shares can then be mapped to individual network drives on the PC’s. It is also connected to the Western Digital servers and automatically copies everything from the drive to my personal ‘cloud’ space on their server. This cloud space is accessible from any PC with web browser and internet connection.My backups are run by 1 PC in the early hours of the morning. I divide backups into things like ‘Work’, ‘Documentation’, ‘Custom work’, ‘Cut files’ etc.
It runs a full backup the 1st of every month and then an incremental backup (only new, or modified files from the previous full backup) every night.If the drive were to fail, I can just buy a new one, connect it to my network, log on to my cloud space and it will copy everything back down to the new drive.
And hopefully, Western Digital won’t go bust so my data should be safe for now.
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Came with the drive. I just put the drive onto my network and then followed all of the setup instructions. Well, I eventually followed them when I couldn’t figure out how to do it on my own :blushing:
BTW, I don’t work for WD, nor am I on comission :smiles:
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That’s great – thanks.
quote Peter Johnson:Came with the drive. I just put the drive onto my network and then followed all of the setup instructions. Well, I eventually followed them when I couldn’t figure out how to do it on my own :blushing: -
I have a 3TB external hard drive and Dropbox.
External hard drive backs up every night and all I do in Dropbox Is copy my work folder paste it in Dropbox. windows then asks if I want to replace the existing work folder. yes. Then If want to replace the subfolders. Yes. Then existing files. No. Then it just backs up the new files.
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After using many other different ways I now use Acronis backup software (paid). It will back up to Network drives and direct drives. It will also back up from one network drive to another. I went this way after having the NAS software constantly fall over, and stop backing up without us knowing it. We also lost files because of this. I been on with Acronis for 6 months and so far not a problem, apart from some licensing issues when I upgraded to 3 users…. eventually got sorted out, and didn’t affect my backing up. You get 30 days free BTW to try.
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