Best practices to keep your computer(s) backed up efficiently?

This may not qualify as "cheap" and is windows specific but the Windows Home Server is working very well for me. I'm backing up several machines and I have 3 months of back ups to choose from if things go wrong. I have the HP Media Smart version and I'm extremely happy with it. Here is a link to a review by Scott Hanselman.

Prior to getting the home server I was taking snapshots and ghosts and had a bunch of scripts that kept data redundant. All of this was very prone to human or otherwise error.

In general I think making backups as automatic as possible will ensure that you always get the level of backup you need. You also want some level of redundancy both on-site and off-site. If the data doesn't exist in two places at once, then it really doesn't exist.

I would recommend the following approaches for maximum redundancy:

Duplicate your important data locally

This can be done using a couple of methods

1. Mirror your drive(s) automatically with RAID-1
2. Automatically clone your drive(s) using an rsync style backup script, or other application (TimeMachine, Carbon Copy Cloner, etc). I would also prefer a backup application which does rolling snapshots (like Apple's Time Machine or rsnapshot)
3. Store all your important data on a dedicated NAS with some sort of dynamically expandable RAID (like a Drobo, or a NetGear ReadyNAS. Use an application (like those listed in method 2) to automatically copy data from your various systems and drives to the NAS on at least a daily basis

Backup your important data offsite

I would recommend using a 'cloud' based backup solution that is automatic. These include:

1. Mozy
2. Carbonite
3. Backblaze

These services automatically upload unlimited data to their servers for $4.95 a month. Some of these services even give you 30 days of snapshots so you can get back to data you accidentally deleted.

Mirror your system drive

If you really want to get crazy paranoid about losing your data, I would also mirror your system drive daily using a mirroring tool like TrueImage, CarbonCopyCloner, SuperDuper. This will give you an exact copy of your system drive, so if your drive fails, you can just pop in the cloned drive and pick up where you left off. No time wasted rebuilding your system, installing old applications, etc.

Here's my home backup strategy:

• Most files are stored on a Linux file server that my Windows machines connect to.
• All my music, video, & images live on a Windows machine that gets backed up to the Linux file server.
• The Linux file server is backed up to an external hard drive
• About 75% of my data is backed up remotely using Jungle Disk.
• All of my remote websites & databases are backed up to my home machines using rsync & mysqldump over ssh.

All of the above happens twice a day.

The end result is that any of my computers can die, my webhost can disappear, or my house can burn down and I'll suffer minimal to no permanent data loss.

The important thing to think is "If this thing dies/breaks/goes away, what will I lose?". Then think it about every source of data you have.

Of course 'cheap' depends on the readers' view...

I'm using a Dlink DNS-323 NAS (equipped with 2x 1TB drives in RAID1) in combination with BackupPc, which is actually a 'gui' around Rsync.

You could also backup the ghost image to a on-line backup service. There are several companies, some which offer free accounts as a starting point.

• IDrive - free option
• Mosy - free option
• ADrive - free option
• Carbonite
• Livedrive
• Jungle Disk with Amazon S3
• SquirrelSave

This isn't a strategy for backing up a whole computer (I use WHS and Time Machine for that), but for critical files, I use Dropbox. It automatically synchronizes files across different computers, plus they get backed up and versioned online. Free for up to 2 gigs, pay for up to 50GB. This is the first online file sych tool or service I've found that just works. Simple, no hassles, set it up and you're done. I love it.

I'd recommend setting up freenas on an old machine with lots of disk space and using an automated rsync program.

Using rsync you are only copying changes between the last version and current over the network, so it's pretty fast.

Home backup strategy:

• Photos, Music, Scans on Main Desktop are backed up using Time Machine connected to External USB Hard Drive
• Videos and large files (e.g. MSDN Downloads) are kept on 1TB RAID5 NAS (NAS will send alert if hard drive is lost)
• Photos, Music, Scans on Main Desktop are backed up a few times a week using Jungle Disk Plus.

I recently had my Main Desktop HDD die and was able to bring everything back in about a day.

Mozy works at home or at work, but I've found the best part is that my gf doesn't have to do anything to get it to work. I installed it and now I know her compy is being backed up all the time.

I have a linux machine and two windows machines that I need to be backed up. I have two 500GB external hard drives formatted to an ext3 file system and have the linux machine run a script that mounts the drive, runs rsnapshot, and unmounts the drive.

Rsnapshot is basically a smart way of using rsync to do efficient backups. I have an rsync daemon running as a service on each of the windows machines (thanks to cygwin) and the rsnapshot process on the linux box connects to that.

You could probably do the same thing using a windows machine as the backup device (rsnapshot is available via cygwin) however rsnapshot makes heavy use of hard links, which is something I'm not confident of with an NTFS file system. YMMV.