best way for backup

How do you guys keep your stuff on your laptop backed up?

any specific software to auto backup or content to external hdd? or basic copy/paste?

 

External hard drive and occasional Blu-ray back up.

 

Acronis TrueImage ( Acronis True Image WD Edition ) or Norton Ghost are decent and consumer-friendly tools, that do background automatic backups ala Apple's Time Machine.

 

Monthly system image backups to external hdd with Windows' backup tool.

Daily backup of my user folder (all documents, photos, etc.) to SD card, automated using GoodSync (there are freeware alternatives, like SyncBack).

Daily backup of user folder (for redudancy) to Windows SkyDrive, automated using Live Mesh.

 

I just do weekly(ish) image backups with Acronis. Save them to my external hdd and my secondary drive (hdd) on my x220.

 

ya, Norton Ghost came with my sdd, I think I should start using that.

 

Ditto. Using Acronis True Image Home 2012. Currently on sale for $49.99 with the Plus Pack.

 

W/o the plus pack (whatever it is) Acronis is on permanent sale for $29.99. WD and Seagate offer a restricted rebranded version of Acronis downloadable for free from their sites, and it offers upgrade to full version via Acronis True Image WD Edition or Seagate DiscWizard

 

Paragon Backup & Recovery 2012 Free. I use this all the time to make a complete image of C: onto a external hdd.
After installing lots of junk, I do recovery once in a while from the image file and make it fresh again.

 

Good to know. I think I paid $39 for mine with the plus pack.

 

Acronis True Image Home 2011 - cloning my HDD into another one of same type

 

External HDD and any critical files are also stored on Dropbox

 

I'm planning on buying an external hdd for backup purposes. I would like them to be relatively small in size for ease of portability (not necessary). Capacity I'm looking for is 2TB.
Do you think I should go 1x 2TB or 2x 1TB?

 

I would go for the 2x1TB, cause you can keep one as an offsite backup, but it'll most likely be more expensive.

 

What do you mean by offsite backup?

And on amazon there aren't much difference bt 2x1tb vs 1x2tb.

 

If all your backups are in one location then there is a chance that you could lose ALL of your data due to fire, theft, gremlins, etc...

This is why its good to keep a backup offsite (e.g., Outside of your home/office).

 

If losing the data is coming from hardware fault, then it's kind of moot having two smaller vs one larger.
Having two drive means the chance of hardware failure has doubled, and in case of hardware failure you will lose half of all your data.
Having one drive means chance of hardware failure is half compared to having two drives, but if you lose it, you lose it all.

It's just personal preference, and I would go with single largest capacity usb 3.0 drive that doesn't require a separate power brick for convenience (usb powered). I hate having to plug a separate power adapter, and if you have multiple drives, you have to decide which files go to which drive.

 

my laptops automatically sync data folders with a Drobo NAS in RAID 1-0 ( 4 drives mirrored and striped ) every day or time I log into my home network. and every night at midnight each laptops vital data portion on the NAS gets compressed and ftp'd to an offsite server.

 

Surprised that no one mentioned cloud backup, yet. I use Crashplan and have a family account to backup 5 PCs. In total 6 TB backuped (that took a while...).

 

see my post above. uploading data to a secure ftp site IS " cloud storage ". I would not be surprised if other users offsite backup is cloud based as well.
my nightly cloud backup is now at 11.3GB, that gets to be a bit large some days
Contrary to common belief cloud storage is not new at all but dates back 30 years to remote WYSE and Xerox terminals storing data in data centers.

 

Man, I can't upload a handful of pictures to Dropbox at a reasonable speed, let alone back up hundreds of gigs of data . We have about 5Mb/s download, and about 0.5Mb/s upload. However, real-world is much, much lower. I would imagine many people are in the same boat.

 

With all that cloud backup storage, especially with providers that charge far less than, say, Amazon S3 does (i.e. $0.10/GB/month ballpark, or about $100 to store 1TB of data per month, and it's quite cheap for reliable storage), the good question is what's going to happen with your data once the project gets some user base and runs out of their initial funding. For instance, fotki.com is a semi-fresh example. Even too-big-to-fail companies are not guaranteed to have projects alive forever ( mobile.me anyone? ).

Plus the time it will take to recover data from the cloud should it really fail. Like your home 1TB drive crashes. How long will it take to get the data back to a new one (even with 100Mbps connection to the service provider, that's in days)? Does your ISP offer unlimited bandwidth free of charge and no throttling?

Of course, if volume of the data to backup is a few megabytes, it's not a concern. But when one starts considering backups of pictures and 1080p home videos etc. etc (and these, if lost, can't be easily recovered), cloud backup, comparable in reliability to 2-3 external drives, is not really an answer. Yet.

 

Nightly backups via duplicity to my home NAS. Weekly to a hard drive that's kept at my office. Bi-weekly of important files to rsync.net (geo-redundant.)

 

Great ideas! I already got the WD 2TB passport, i'll see what I can do with it.

 

Everything you say is correct. I do not rely solely on cloud backup and I make a conservative image backup occasionally. Cloud backup has the additional advantage that it constantly and incrementally backups all your files, without deleting old copies. I recently screwed up several of my TeX files, but I was able to use a backup that has been uploaded an hour before. I would loose this layer or protection without cloud backup.