Backups in 2025 - Best Practice Discussion

LBigBargainBoi on 29/12/2024 - 09:17
Last edited 29/12/2024 - 10:05 by 1 other user

Hi OzBargainers, I have a goal in 2025 to 'clean up' and simplify my digital footprint.

Part of that is to get my backup process sorted. I currently only use cloud services, but I've seen some horror stories of people getting locked out of their accounts. Let's have a chat about best practice backups for individuals/households.

  1. What's your strategy? 3-2-1? Cloud only?
  2. (If using) what physical storage media do you recommend? (ie. HDD, SSD, something else)?
  3. Any advice on making this process as easy and reliable as possible? (ie. software, reminders, etc.)

Any advice and discussion is appreciated.

Computing

Comments

  • BigBargainBoi on 29/12/2024 - 09:22
    +1

    To get started this is what I'm thinking (please roast it):

    1. Cloud linked to phone/photo albums, cloud linked to pc for files, Download everything from there 3-6 months to a portable SSD. Get a 2nd drive (maybe HDD) and back up the SSD every 12 months.
    2. Use SSD for regular backups and HDD for long term storage.
    3. Set cal reminders, not sure about software.. haven't got that far yet!
    • Skramit on 29/12/2024 - 10:06
      +2

      Cloud linked to phone/photo albums

      The only issue i found with this is it backs up all the absolute junk i photograph with my phone like work receipts, google map screenshots, and a metric tonne of other useless crap i use my phone camera for or screenshots. So I avoid auto cloud sync from my phone and prefer to backup my phone to my PC photos about once a month.

      Set cal reminders, not sure about software.. haven't got that far yet!

      Try SyncBackFree if just wanting a regular backup from one disk to another.

      • BigBargainBoi on 29/12/2024 - 10:28
        +1

        Yes! The crap it backs up is super annoying and I used to do what you would do.. then I would never manually push the backup. Came close to losing a tonne photos due to this.

  • EightImmortals on 29/12/2024 - 09:26
    +1

    NAS plus external HDD on the NAS.

    • Clear on 29/12/2024 - 09:31
      +3

      Plus an off-site backup of some kind like cloud. Can have the NAS syncing with OneDrive, Dropbox etc.

      Why some may ask? Fire or theft. No point having a backup and a backup of a backup right next to each other.

      It's important to check that the backup works too. A lot of people plug in external HDDs and forget about it. The backup stops working for various reasons or the drives starts dying.

  • Nugs on 29/12/2024 - 09:59
    +1

    we used tapes at work…..
    sent offsite on a regular basis as well as internally rotated
    but yeah, for the more 'critical' stuff at home, it's just triplicate hard drives (duplicate for media)
    .

    • JimmyF on 29/12/2024 - 11:28

      but yeah, for the more 'critical' stuff at home, it's just triplicate hard drives (duplicate for media)

      triplicate is great, but you need a copy off-site to cover a total house lose. aka fire.

  • Skramit on 29/12/2024 - 10:02
    +1
    1. I backup docs and photos locally to second SSD inside my PC.
    2. Then I back it all up to a RAID5 HDD NAS at home.
    3. Then I sync my photos and docs that I dont want to lose to the cloud via OneDrive.

    For local disk and NAS backups I use SyncBackFree - great little light weight but powerful backup tool that you can either schedule or just run manually when you need to. You can choose backup, sync or mirror dependings on your needs.

    I was considering giving a family member a little NUC with a 4TB SSD and then syncing via Private VPN as well but it feels a bit overkill so havent done this yet.

    • BigBargainBoi on 29/12/2024 - 10:30

      Thats 2 recommendations for SyncBackFree now. Thanks for the tip!

  • CyberMurning on 29/12/2024 - 10:03

    NAS

  • theHMASfriendship on 29/12/2024 - 10:18
    +1

    I back up daily using a series of notebooks.

    • BigBargainBoi on 29/12/2024 - 10:31
      +1

      Interesting.. I have 3 spare old laptops. Any documentation out there on this process?

      • theHMASfriendship on 29/12/2024 - 14:23
        +5

        No I just buy some notepads from officeworks and a lot of pens.

  • glass2k on 29/12/2024 - 10:23
    +1

    I have complete reliance on Cloud services for backups with no offsite backup. Maybe in the future I might setup something.

    NAS for immediate and working access to files.
    Server serving Web Applications and other things.

    Backup NAS and Server files to backblaze via RClone (extremely cheap like a 50c for 120GB)

    Backup photos to OneDrive to be shared with my family.

    I recognised that photos and media are the biggest size (around 1TB) and I need it to be accessible for my entire family and I, so I didn't mind forking over the extra cash for OneDrive. I would have used OneDrive over BackBlaze but OneDrive doesn't play nice with Rclone.

  • GordonD on 29/12/2024 - 10:40

    A slightly related question.

    I use the free WD version of Acronis True Image.

    Just noticed the other day that the fan on one PC was running surprisingly quickly and noisily, even though nothing was running on it.

    Checked to see what was running and Acronis was running active protection against ransomware by default, and for whatever reason, on that PC is was using nearly 40% of the CPU. Fired up all the others one by one and each showed a surprising amount of CPU use by that software, though mostly it was under 10%.

    Was on the internet a little while back and clicked on something that looked intriguing, only to have a message come up saying my files were being encrypted, and not to bother trying to stop it, shutdown and restart were locked out, and they were. But when I hard rebooted the machine it came up OK. I assumed at the time it was fake ransomware. But now I'm wondering whether it was, or I was saved by the active Acronis protection, and its worth leaving it running, even if it chews up lots of CPU.

    • the1doood on 02/01/2025 - 00:39

      If a ransomware is encrypting your data, disk usage will be high. Not just the CPU.

  • Marty-69 on 29/12/2024 - 12:58
    +2

    Phones backup to Google Cloud and a portable USB-C NVMe drive. I can also upload to my NAS.
    Computers backup to a NAS with RAID-1 (data on 2 spinning disks). The NAS makes a daily backup to an SSD USB drive (I take the USB drive with me when I'm away for more than a day) and a daily upload to Backblaze in the US. If I lose everything, Backblaze can FedEx a disk to me with all my (encrypted) data.

  • kogi on 29/12/2024 - 13:07

    This is for my work

    Image backup to SSD, and HD
    Encrypted upload to dropbox $184 / year for 2tb . Plus $70 discount for amex.
    Copy download to my home server.

  • Rako on 29/12/2024 - 18:51

    I use Cobian backup I have a large capacity Flash drive permanently plugged into my PC, every night Cobian backs up to the flash drive & a cloud storage facility.
    What I like about Cobian is it simply uses zip to backup so no need for a proprietary backup solution to restore files.

  • Kustard King on 30/12/2024 - 07:36

    I have a 2x drive redundancy old Synology NAS.

    • This is connected to iDrive with a cheap package and does backups of anything important.

    • I have google photos linked to NAS as well which does automatic sync to the NAS.

  • PhilosophicalTurtle on 30/12/2024 - 09:14
    +1

    Pretty decent options for backup are already mentioned above. I would like to add that as a part of my strategy, I am transitioning from restrictive ways the big tech manage my data

    • Apple organises my photo and video files in the most incompatible ways that if I were to even think about using a different photo manager, it is practically impossible to switch and would involve a tremendous amount of labour
    • My decades old music organisation has been destroyed several times
    • Infiltration of AI tools and its implication on privacy, we all know about the open secret backdoors these companies are required to provide to the governments, random companies pushing advertising based on searches on another application or browser including unauthorized audio snippets being used to push certain video recommendations(TikTok)

    I would probably be slowly transitioning to Linux for a stable backup and storage environment, NAS has failed me several times and there have been breaches in Synology and QNap NAS so I am not taking the expensive route again, sticking with free, open source and self hosted environments. Would be splitting backups to archival DVDs for media cold storage, HDD for warm, SSD and cloud for regular backups and hot storage.

  • Benno007 on 30/12/2024 - 09:34
    +1

    I've been using OneDrive for about 14 years now, the family 1TB x6 is a pretty good price when compared with google drive/icloud/dropbox… (~$130/yr). I just hit 800GB of photos/videos (had to compress some large concert videos) so am gonna need something else soon I think.

    I then have this entirely downloaded on to an external harddrive as it can't all fit on my laptop.

    I keep a copy of my favorite photos locally on my laptop (~100gb) separate to onedrive, in case onedrive gets deleted/hacked. I wish I had a NAS… but they're so much more expensive than just a hdd

    I use onedrive camera roll backup while on holiday, in case i lose my phone, and at the end of the holiday I usually import all the photos into my computer and then group them before moving to onedrive. I then use dupeGuru to find duplicates between Camera Roll and the ones I import to save on space.

    I organise all my photos by folders and can pretty much call up any friend/family member or location I've been to before and find a photo within a minute, it takes a lot of time to organise, but is better than relying on e.g. Apple/Google/OneDrive to categorise photos… When importing say 10,000 photos into apple photos, the map feature lets you group photos by location to make albums, so that's a bit easier than scrolling through and manually selecting them. I always export originals, but then you kinda get the split of the photo and video for live photos which is a bit annoying.

    Folders are:
    Family (each family member/events/birthdays), Holidays (each trip, each location subfolders), Life (cars, houses, placed I've lived, places I've worked, people, Life events/celebrations, Concerts, Day-Trips, Hikes), Photography (like moon/sunsets etc).

    • BigBargainBoi on 30/12/2024 - 09:45

      Nice one. When downloading your files to the external hdd do you use any software or process to write over the previous data? Do you just download the latest folders?

Login or Join to leave a comment
Login Join