Ask HN: How do you backup your computer?

[mirrormaster]

How do you backup your computer? I was wondering whether to go with cloud services like BackBlaze or to use some software to periodically sync data with external drives. I would love to know what people are using!

[pwg]

Additional box with WD Red drives in Linux RAID5 software raid configuration.

Rsnapshot (https://rsnapshot.org/), run via cron, nightly, pulling backups from the other machines that need backing up.

[mirrormaster]

Never heard of Rsnapshot before. Thanks for bringing it up, I will definitely check it out.

[Silhouette]

At the office, we tend to have frequently scheduled sync of any important data from personal devices to a server, and other important data is centrally hosted on servers anyway. Servers have RAID set up. So far none of that is really a true back-up, but it gives us some resilience against immediate hardware failure.

The true back-up is dailies (or on demand if appropriate) from the server to an off-site backup service. All data already encrypted on our side before it leaves the building. We take some measures to ensure consistent snapshots, including for tricky applications like databases and source control repositories where a filesystem-level snapshot may be insufficiently robust.

[jonathanstrange]

Crashplan for Small Business. Not the cheapest, but with the amount of backup data I have it's roughly as expensive as Wasabi with some backup program (e.g. Cloudberry), and in my experience Crashplan just works. I transitioned from Crashplan Home to Crashplan for Small Business and was able to keep my archive.

IMHO, the most important thing about backup is that it always backs up everything. Too many applications and setups fail silently.

[shervinafshar]

Auto-backup alternatively to two Time Machine disks. Off-site backup using Crashplan for a portion of content critical. Manual regular cold storage to S3 Glacier.

[stockkid]

I use Dropbox to sync select directories that are important. So far it is working well for me because there is almost zero maintenance.

[runjake]

Time Machine + Backblaze on Mac.

File History + Backblaze on Windows.

[totaldude87]

BackBlaze - hands down!