Backup Solutions

[iluvsheep]

Like others before me, I too would like to mend my ways and setup a real backup solution. For this purpose, I've requisitioned a NAS that will soon have RAID-5. Now, I just need a way of getting the data from my computer to it.

Things I'd like:

• Backup the whole hard drive (perhaps with folder exclusion), ideally also the windows registry and

Comments

[mbrubeck]

Since you're planning to do this remotely anyways, did you consider using a hosted service like Jungle Disk? It meets all of your criteria except it's not free. Depending on how much data you have, the cost of Jungle Disk (monthly charge of $2 + $0.15/GB) might be more or less than the cost of buying and maintaining your own storage device.

My personal experience is very Linux-biased and maybe not very useful for Windows, but anyways:

I'm currently using the open-source Duplicity to do encrypted, incremental, versioned backups to my own servers and to Amazon S3. It's a Unixy command-line tool (can be used under Cygwin on Windows) and you'd need to use something like cron to set it up as a fire-and-forget job. As with many encrypted backup formats, it's possible but not exactly easy to access individual files in the backup. (You can list files and restore individual files from the command line.)

I've also used rsnapshot which is very similar except it doesn't do encryption and doesn't support S3 (but does make it easy to access individual files, since they're just stored in normal directories).

I have different sets of included/excluded files so that things like my music collection are backed up to my home server but not to S3 (because I don't care about losing them enough to bother with the time and cost of remote backup).

If you go with an S3-based option, note that you can now mail your data to Amazon on physical media to avoid a 30-hour initial upload.

[iluvsheep]

You make a good point about online backups, but ...

Backups, like most things are very susceptible to the 90/10 rule (trade-off between outcome and effort). Backing up my entire computer requires a terabyte, but if I really thought about it and went through it, I could probably cut that down to a couple of gigs of truly original documents/programs/etc. In the end, the concept of going through all my data and determining which required backup and which didn't sounded pretty daunting, much more so that the couple of hundred dollars that I would need to shell out for the one-time investment of enough hardware to do a complete backup.

Also, having done it recently, fully reconstructing all the "unimportant" data takes a while (about a week of evenings). For example, Firefox is easy to reinstall, but I don't really like the defaults it comes with. I want it to work like the Firefox I know and love, which requires a lot of settings and add-ons that I don't have memorized and whose absence I must discover by frustrating trial and error.

Thanks for the recommendations of Duplicity and rsnapshot. I'll take a deeper look at them later, but it looks like I want something like rsnapshot that also understands Windows' "special files" like the registry and the trash can.

[inferno0069]

You probably wouldn't need a special rsnapshot, but just a config file someone else had prepared with a list of what to exclude.

[inferno0069]

Oh, oops, once I got all the way down here I thought you were excluding, not hoping to include, the trash can.