Best practices to keep your computer(s) backed up efficiently? / Admins

This may not qualify as "cheap" and is windows specific but the Windows Home Server is working very well for me. I'm backing up several machines and I have 3 months of back ups to choose from if things go wrong. I have the HP Media Smart version and I'm extremely happy with it. Here is a link to a review by Scott Hanselman.

Prior to getting the home server I was taking snapshots and ghosts and had a bunch of scripts that kept data redundant. All of this was very prone to human or otherwise error.

Here's my home backup strategy:

• Most files are stored on a Linux file server that my Windows machines connect to.
• All my music, video, & images live on a Windows machine that gets backed up to the Linux file server.
• The Linux file server is backed up to an external hard drive
• About 75% of my data is backed up remotely using Jungle Disk.
• All of my remote websites & databases are backed up to my home machines using rsync & mysqldump over ssh.

All of the above happens twice a day.

The end result is that any of my computers can die, my webhost can disappear, or my house can burn down and I'll suffer minimal to no permanent data loss.

The important thing to think is "If this thing dies/breaks/goes away, what will I lose?". Then think it about every source of data you have.

You could also backup the ghost image to a on-line backup service. There are several companies, some which offer free accounts as a starting point.

• IDrive - free option
• Mosy - free option
• ADrive - free option
• Carbonite
• Livedrive
• Jungle Disk with Amazon S3
• SquirrelSave

I'd recommend setting up freenas on an old machine with lots of disk space and using an automated rsync program.

Using rsync you are only copying changes between the last version and current over the network, so it's pretty fast.

My home backup strategy utilises a set of daily or weekly backups using backupninja and rdiff-backup to an external disk to keep 60 days worth of incremental backups.

I have another disk offsite that I occasionally bring home and rsync with off the onsite backup disk.

I also use unison to sync various directories between my desktop and laptop. Not a backup as such, but a useful extra copy to have.

I have a linux machine and two windows machines that I need to be backed up. I have two 500GB external hard drives formatted to an ext3 file system and have the linux machine run a script that mounts the drive, runs rsnapshot, and unmounts the drive.

Rsnapshot is basically a smart way of using rsync to do efficient backups. I have an rsync daemon running as a service on each of the windows machines (thanks to cygwin) and the rsnapshot process on the linux box connects to that.

You could probably do the same thing using a windows machine as the backup device (rsnapshot is available via cygwin) however rsnapshot makes heavy use of hard links, which is something I'm not confident of with an NTFS file system. YMMV.

I have a lot of data and its in terms of videos and audio data and best way of backing up to me is to have 2 hard disk backups and 1 dvd backup of the most important data. And 1 hard disk back and 1 dvd backup of lesser important data

I use Acronis True Image instead of Norton Ghost as i find it to be a much better interface and its a more reliable software to use as i have faced corruption of backups with Norton Ghost but this is from my own personal experience.

Its not a very cheap solution but then ultimately its the data that counts, alternatively you could also buy a cheap unlimited hosting account and store your data there too, but then the security of the server is up to you, though i wouldn't trust my important data online

I have a Mac and a PC on the same network. I periodically run Folder Synchronizer (by SoftoBe) on my Mac, which talks to the shared drives on my PC, and copies the data. Time Machine does the rest.

I consider Time Machine my "house on fire" drive. All I need to take with me is that external drive. (Well... the wife and kid too.)

Mine is setup as follows:

I have a webserver with about 8 websites on a shared server with GoDaddy, my laptop, wifes laptop, and a spare laptop.

Spare laptop uses Server2003 (previously XP Pro) and is always on. It has logmein installed so i can access files if i dont have my laptop.

1. I do not save any work on my laptop and I am slowly convincing my wife to do the same
2. Other option is to use EverydayAutobackup to backup both wifes and my laptop to SpareLaptop - problem is they are not always on - maybe I can run it when logging on?
3. All work/pics/etc is saved in MyDocuments on the Spare W2003 Laptop.
4. This is backed up every six hours using EverydayAutoBackup
5. Backup goes to F: on Spare Laptop (USB HD)
6. Thinking of buying a second USB HD called G: and will mirror F: > G: every alternative 6 hours so if either breaks suddenly, we can immediately recover data and buy new USB HD to replace broken.
7. W2003 laptop backs up my websites' databases every day using a scheduled task on a batch file - mysqldump to a location im mydocuments (which will plug into my system and be backed up to F: and mirrored to G..eventually)

TODO:

1. Backup the files on webserver to My docs on home laptop - any ideas? Can i schedule an ssh task?
2. Either buy another USB HD called G: OR mirror F: to an offsite location (or both)
3. Both sounds good so offsite location is only for extreme circumstances.
4. Also need to think of security...What happens if someone takes F or G and plugs into their PC - are there any secure USB HDs out there?