In 2007 I posted about my Family's Backup Strategy and encouraged you to develop your own, or confirm the one you already have. At the time, my strategy was primary using Mozy.com as an online backup along with a Windows Home Server for local backup. After Windows Home Server recently removed Drive Extender technology (their version of RAID support in case a disk fails) I switched over to a Synology 1511+ and did a podcast on it.
Here's the summary if you feel the rest of this post is TL;DR and a ramble, which is likely because it is.
I've been experimenting with cloud-based backup trying nearly everything out there from KeepVault to CrashPlan. I'm currently "between online backup strategies" right now, although I'm leaning towards CrashPlan. Most of these online backup companies are pretty confusing when you factor in someone with a server. For example, I have a main computer in my house but I also have a server. I have a KitchenPC and my wife's laptop but both of those don't matter as all the data is on server. However, I really want disk images for my main machine.
I need two things:
The whole point here being if a natural disaster happens no family videos or photos will be lost. For folks that keep all their files on their local PCs and not a server, any of these online services is great. However, as soon as I centralized my files, things got more complex. KeepVault is the best for Windows Home Server users as it has a custom Home Server client that integrates to the WHS control panel directly.
Now that I've moved over to a Linux-solution like Synology, other than using straight rsync or rsync to S3, the best solution appears to be CrashPlan Headless. While it's not directly supported on the Synology, there are LOTS of people who want to make this work so I wouldn't be totally alone, although the instructions are daunting and insane to say the least.
At this point, today, I've got a 4TB SAN with about 1.5TB on it and no cloud storage. And honestly, I wasn't looking forward to waiting two weeks (or longer) to upload 1.5TB to a new service, and I'm not sure what my ISP would say about it. I think that initial seed of large datasets is the Achilles Heel of online backup.
I really don't feel comfortable with my backups unless they are offsite. So I went and bought two Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1 TB USB 3.0 Drives and labeled them Backup A and Backup B.
I recommend that you encrypt the whole disk. The last thing you want when you're copying your entire life onto one drive is to do it in the great wide open. There's two good ways to do it, BitLocker To Go or TrueCrypt.
You really can't go wrong with either of these choices. For testing, I'm trying each of them, one on each drive. I like TrueCrypt, though because it's open source, but I like that BitLocker is built-in to Windows. We'll see. Point is, don't put your life on a disk unencrypted.
NOTE: Both of these encryption tools take forever (hours) to encrypt the whole disk. Be patient. It'll be a while.
I'm using Acronis Image Home 2011 PC Backup and Recovery for my imaging solution. There are a lot of negative reviews of the 2011 version on Amazon but I haven't had any issues. Be aware. I'm always open to try new products if you have any recommendations, Dear Reader.
I use SyncBack to copy files on a schedule through my main machine from my server to the external drive. I could connect the drives directly to the Synology but I want to use my Windows machine for encryption.
My wife takes Drive A to the bank's safety deposit box in her monthly visit, then we just swap drives one a month with new backups. I'm not sure if I'll eventually get around to installing CrashPlan on the Synology (I hope it gets easier) but my current offsite "no cloud" backup strategy is working very nicely and it doesn't cost any bandwidth. In fact, I can transfer 1.5TB in just 10 minutes (of driving)!
* Cloud icon from The Noun Project, CC BY 3.0
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. I am a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
I think that initial seed of large datasets is the Achilles Heel of online backup.
I keep one of the TrueCrypt disks mounted and 3 times a week at night it copies from \\SERVER to the local TrueCrypt disk.
In fact, I can transfer 1.5TB in just 10 minutes (of driving)!"
CrashPlan does block-level de-duplication, so it doesn't matter if identical files are backed up from two different sources, so e.g. when my wife copies some of my photos to her laptop, her backup is very quick as my machine already backed up those blocks. It also prioritises backups so that the most local destination is completed first (in my case, it backs up to my server before backing up to the cloud), which means that you are safer (backed up) quicker.
#!/bin/bashexport TMP=/x/tmpexport PASSPHRASE=secret1export FTP_PASSWORD=secret2duplicity --full-if-older-than 6M /x/downloads/photos ftp://ikke%40example.com@ftp.livedrive.com/downloads/photosduplicity remove-older-than 6M --force ftp://ikke%40example.com@ftp.livedrive.com/downloads/photos# more similar lines for other foldersunset PASSPHRASEunset FTP_PASSWORD
Unfortunately that isn't true. It does do de-duplication, but only on each machine it is running on. It does not do de-duplication across machines using the same CrashPlan account.Such account wide de-duplication is a commonly requested feature, but it is challenging to implement and when I last looked it they hadn't committed to implementing it.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.