Im wondering what peoples backup solutions are.

Since I started working from home a few years back Ive become increasingly paranoid about loosing all my data so ended up picking up a copy of Acronis Trueimage and a nice big external hard drive. It takes about three hours to run an Acronis backup assuming I want a full image, less if its incremental.

One thing that has dawned on me though is that creating a whole hard drive backup is effectively pointless for me. I can understand the need for people who have to be up and running 100% immediately but instead Ive decided to ditch Acronis and just move all of my important files to My Documents, Shared Documents and on the Desktop. Three nice and easy folders to back up that take a maximum of half an hour as opposed to three hours with Acronis. Admittedly Id have to re-install everything myself rather than just tell Acronis to make a clone of the image if I ever need to install a new hard drive but it just seems so much easier than faffing with 3rd party programs that may not work when it comes to the crunch and you need your image restoring. As long as the vital bits like my work things, downloaded payware programs, e-mails and bookmarks and suchlike are stored thats all I really need.

Im also trialling Carbonite (https://www.carbonite.com/) and its going well, very non-intrusive and will back on the three aforementioned important folders to an off site location, so between that and daily backups to an external hard drive I think Ive got it covered, it appears Acronis was complete overkill and I was using it because I was lazy rather than because I needed it.

What are peoples backup solutions, what do you use, what have you used in the past and what do you recommend?

robocopy as a shutdown script.

Matt

This was my solution also, but it annoyed me as it took too long (since generally if Im shutting down my computer its once every couple of months and Im usually in a rush to leave). So now I manually run my robocopy batch file to backup my data when I think about it.

When I install Windows 7 I will probably take a backup image as soon as I have all my apps, etc installed and everything just right, and use this to accompany my manual robocopy backups.

I use Acronis to generate a backup of my OS partition. This is updated automagically every week.

I use SyncBack to backup all of my data. I move everything I want to backup onto an internal 1TB hdd. That HDD is then backed up to my server (mirrored raid).

My server backs up everything that is on the mirrored raid to an external HDD.

Finally I have several external HDDs that are used to backup my movies and music. This is something that I do manually when the mood takes me.

I have been playing around with the free V-stuff backup from VirginMedia. And I have to say that the concept is very good. Ive also been looking at Carbonite, for $5 p/m the unlimited backup space is very appealing. The only problem I have with these offsite solutions is the time that the initial upload and indeed a restore would take.

After trying Carbonite I cant recommend it. It automatically excludes lots of files and folders such as video files and things it deems to be temporary. It also wont back up executables so you have to zip up any software youve bought and downloaded. The result is you spend hours going through your folders just to double check that everything you need is backed up. Mozy appears to be better, works out at around the same price per month (no free trial though) but you can just select entire folders or even drives and itll sort it all out for you without excluding anything. (http://mozy.com/)

Carbonite also kept trying to auto-throttle itself and messing up and eating my bandwidth. Mozy just lets you set a % of connection utilised and change it on the fly depending on what youre doing, but Ive got it maxed out and am having no problems with browsing and using the internet in general.

I have 3 PCs at home, 2 GAMES PC/s & One home PC for office, email, scanning, printing, photo editing etc.
I keep a copy of data from the home PC on both the Games PCs data partitions. (one set of Data duplicated across 3 PCs using Stripped SataII Drives)

Then I backup pictures to DVD and keep personal/critical data on an IDE Drive that sits in a removable drive caddy.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/LINDY-Hard-Drive-Caddy-Black/dp/B0012E42W0

When the mood takes me I can remove the IDE drive and store it offsite, usefull when I go on holiday.

I use Synctoy v1.4 to copy data between the various shared folders.
Nothing is automated, I dont do enough work to need it automated, I just kickoff synctoy on the Home PC when Ive downloaded MP3s or uploaded a video or written a letter to the bank  8-)

Incidentally Mozy is better than Carbonite for online backups because it reticulates the splines.

Incidentally Mozy is better than Carbonite for online backups because it reticulates the splines.

you should never leave your splines unreticulated