The Data Backup Thread (& request for more suggestions)

I had been a pretty loyal customer to Crashplan home, having them for 5 years at this point and recommending them to family and friends. Went so far as to run the Crashplan client on my NAS, to provide a "local" backup location for family and friends so they could come over, for a visit, backup their entire computer in an afternoon and have some protection while they waited a month or two for the slow networks where most of them live to upload to Crashplan Central.

Since the announcement, I've switched to running NextCloud and providing a dropbox like service to family and friends, as well as encouraging them to install Duplicati to continue to back up to me over NextCloud's WebDAV protocol.

The next decision though is, do then backup my NAS to Backblaze B2, or do we all take the money we were sending to Crashplan and build another NAS hosted at someone else's house so that my NAS has offsite backup.

What's the best way to have a local backup of a few terabytes of data? Hard drives? Tape? Etched platinum discs?

I've got a cloud backup, but I'm paranoid. And even cloud backup solutions have only a few plans that allow for terabytes.

Easiest and cheapest way is just an external USB drive.

My nas has a few backup programs. I'm currently using one called hyper backup to backup 2TB which took 2 days to backup over usb 2.0. The restore took 12 hours over usb 3.0. New backups over usb 3.0 to external drive takes barely any time because it only backs up new stuff.

This backup is working ok but I'm going to throw it out and replace it with stone tablets and a chisel. Or I might try one of the other methods talked about in this thread but I doubt they will be better than stone tablets.

LeapingGnome wrote:

Easiest and cheapest way is just an external USB drive.

Yes. Plug in USB drive, backup to it, unplug it, and ideally stick it in a bank safe deposit box.

I prefer for cloud backup to be thought of as a last resort. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, even getting them to cloud backup as their first and only resort can be a challenge.

Yeah, that was my previous solution, but I ended up with a box of obsolete hard drives. (Take extra care that you don't lose the external power cord for USB hard drives.) I was hoping something better would come along.

I was about to say that 8TB external hard drives were expensive, but then I checked the prices and it's not as bad as I thought.

Speaking of which, are there any tools anyone can recommend for managing a backup to an external USB? For my personal computer, I've just been copying files, but that's not the best for managing a continuing backup. (Though it does mean it's easy to restore files. As long as you're not trying to do a partial restore. Or want multiple versions.)

Gremlin wrote:

Speaking of which, are there any tools anyone can recommend for managing a backup to an external USB? For my personal computer, I've just been copying files, but that's not the best for managing a continuing backup. (Though it does mean it's easy to restore files. As long as you're not trying to do a partial restore. Or want multiple versions.)

Get a Mac.

Gravey wrote:
Gremlin wrote:

Speaking of which, are there any tools anyone can recommend for managing a backup to an external USB? For my personal computer, I've just been copying files, but that's not the best for managing a continuing backup. (Though it does mean it's easy to restore files. As long as you're not trying to do a partial restore. Or want multiple versions.)

Get a Mac. ;)

Windows includes File History for file versioning and recovery, or even full system imaging.

Gremlin wrote:

Speaking of which, are there any tools anyone can recommend for managing a backup to an external USB? For my personal computer, I've just been copying files, but that's not the best for managing a continuing backup. (Though it does mean it's easy to restore files. As long as you're not trying to do a partial restore. Or want multiple versions.)

If you can mount the external drive as a share or a drive letter, Veeam should be able to handle what you need.

I'm starting to sound like a Veeam salesman. I think I'll ask for a commission. Let's see, 10 percent of nothing, carry the nothing...

Teneman wrote:
Gremlin wrote:

Speaking of which, are there any tools anyone can recommend for managing a backup to an external USB? For my personal computer, I've just been copying files, but that's not the best for managing a continuing backup. (Though it does mean it's easy to restore files. As long as you're not trying to do a partial restore. Or want multiple versions.)

If you can mount the external drive as a share or a drive letter, Veeam should be able to handle what you need.

I'm starting to sound like a Veeam salesman. I think I'll ask for a commission. Let's see, 10 percent of nothing, carry the nothing...

I'll join you - we seem to be repeating ourselves from the previous page - but Veeam Agent is the best local backup solution I've come across yet (and I've seen and tried many over the years - now 20 of them working in small business IT).
And it's properly free - not "free for the first terabyte" or "free unless you want scheduled backups" or "free for 30 days or "watch this video from our sponsors before you back up" ...

Can't believe CrashPlan did this. 6 years I've had that and they won't even cancel the remnant of the contract. Blaze it is.

Gremlin wrote:

Speaking of which, are there any tools anyone can recommend for managing a backup to an external USB? For my personal computer, I've just been copying files, but that's not the best for managing a continuing backup. (Though it does mean it's easy to restore files. As long as you're not trying to do a partial restore. Or want multiple versions.)

Robocopy. I've been using it for years.

Anyone used IDrive on Windows? Seems to be the only one besides CrashPlan that supports NAS backup without either an expensive business subscription or a lot of maneuvering to trick the software into thinking it's not a NAS drive.

Gremlin wrote:

Speaking of which, are there any tools anyone can recommend for managing a backup to an external USB? For my personal computer, I've just been copying files, but that's not the best for managing a continuing backup. (Though it does mean it's easy to restore files. As long as you're not trying to do a partial restore. Or want multiple versions.)

I use SyncBack for my local backups. Super easy to setup and use. Both unplugged of course, but I rotate two drives in and out of a fireproof safe. I really should put one in a safe deposit box though.

If you have less than 1TB to back up, consider a MS Office personal plan. $60 per year and you get one install of the Office apps + 1TB of OneDrive storage.

PaladinTom wrote:

If you have less than 1TB to back up, consider a MS Office personal plan. $60 per year and you get one install of the Office apps + 1TB of OneDrive storage.

*Looks at newly-installed 6TB drive, rapidly filling up with renders*

I'm afraid I'm a bit beyond 1TB solutions, at least on my work workstation.

Gravey wrote:

but Backblaze looks better on every front.

That was a very clever use of an opportunity. I love the way they've put that information together. I'll give that a look over tonight. I currently have 60GB in "the cloud", so I'm not looking forward to tying up my uploads again...

For those of you that have a NAS and a cloud backup service, do you backup your computers to both the NAS and the cloud? Or backup your computers to the NAS only, then backup your NAS to the cloud?

McChuck wrote:

For those of you that have a NAS and a cloud backup service, did you backup your computers to both the NAS and the cloud? Or backup your computers to the NAS only, then backup your NAS to the cloud?

I'm hesitant to hold myself up as an example, but I have them separate. Partially that because the cloud backup was there first, and partially because that way if there's something wrong with the backup to the NAS, the cloud backup uses a completely different method.

I imagine if you have the backups on the NAS plus documents on the NAS to backup, it might be more efficient to do it that way. Or if you're backing up multiple machines to the NAS.

McChuck wrote:

For those of you that have a NAS and a cloud backup service, do you backup your computers to both the NAS and the cloud? Or backup your computers to the NAS only, then backup your NAS to the cloud?

For most stuff I back up from computer > Synology NAS (which also acts as my cloud) > Amazon Web Services (off site backup).

However now that I have an android phone I have a lot of needed documents and pretty much all pictures from camera and phone going: Google Drive > NAS > AWS.

I back up our machines to the main family computer, and from there to NAS and cloud backup. I suppose that makes the main computer a fancy NAS with a backup NAS.

I don't actually use cloud backup at the moment: I back up to a NAS, and then the NAS backs itself up to a second RAID array that's not exposed over the network. (and not mounted/online except during the backup.)

If I did, I'd probably experiment with encrypting the backup drive locally, and then doing a cloud backup of the device-as-a-file, backing it up while unmounted. If that didn't seem to work well (I haven't actually experimented with how well rsync handles this), then I'd make a file just a tiny bit shorter than the backup volume, do a loopback encrypted volume inside, and then back THAT up.

The key issue for me: making sure that the unencrypted data never hits the cloud provider's network. Doing it this way, I would likely be renting storage space, rather than a backup service, and rolling it myself, although it's possible that a backup client program could work for me. I'd just need to make sure it had access to the encrypted file, but no access to the password and/or private key.

Other than the roll-it-myself nature of this, there's also the downside that you're always using the same amount of space on the provider. This is bad in one sense, you're paying for the maximum storage you could use, all the time. But it's good in another, because it'll be very hard to tell how much data is actually in the backup. It'd be possible to figure that out by storing and analyzing deltas, but it would take serious, targeted attention by someone. It wouldn't likely fall under dragnet surveillance.

That's a good method if you have a fast, always-on connection and security concerns.

Our family pictures, my daughter's digital art and gaming stuff, and my wife's digital scrapbook stuff are secure from a data preservation viewpoint. They're what go out to the cloud, and differential backup really helps keep them up to date over a cellular connection from who knows where. For really sensitive stuff, it's on a drive in a fire safe container.

Is there a tool to encrypt individual files instead of creating an encrypted container? Something that would preserve file names, but render them unreadable until, they are decrypted.

Similar to how ransomware viruses work.

That's a good method if you have a fast, always-on connection and security concerns.

The way I figure it, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who have security concerns, and those who don't know they have security concerns.

Malor, what's your contingency for a local catastrophic event, say fire, or similar?

From what I understand the Synology encrypts the back up while it sending to AWS. I can still request individual files but only from through a Synology diskstation with the correct key. This creates some other concerns (mainly requiring Synology hardware to retrieve data) but having the backup encrypted does make me feel more comfortable.

Malor wrote:
That's a good method if you have a fast, always-on connection and security concerns.

The way I figure it, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who have security concerns, and those who don't know they have security concerns.

I agree. The rest of my post informed this statement, which was that the data I'm backing up to the cloud is of no concern security-wise.

m0nk3yboy wrote:
Gravey wrote:

but Backblaze looks better on every front.

That was a very clever use of an opportunity. I love the way they've put that information together. I'll give that a look over tonight. I currently have 60GB in "the cloud", so I'm not looking forward to tying up my uploads again...

The number of alternatives with Linux clients is limited, but they have a guide:

https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/...

For using their "B2" service instead. Which seems to charge by data, as opposed to a set monthly fee. Still haven't decided if I want to invest the effort of setting that up and re-uploading everything to a new service, or just switch over to the Crashplan small business thing.

B2 is more like Amazon S3: raw cloud storage upon which systems can be built, but in and of itself is just storage.