At 11:46 AM -0500 1/12/11, Yersinia wrote:
The only hole in my backup system at this time is that I don't have a REMOTE ("off-site") backup. Prior to very recently, I didn't have one due to (a) not enough money to buy a SECOND 500 GB external HD, and (b) not having any reasonably accessible place to KEEP a remote backup if I had one. I also have to admit I was sort of rolling my eyes at the idea because what good is weeks- or months- old data; if I crash today and can't restore from yesterday's which is right here (i.e., somewhere in the house), the loss is already significant at best, at least with regards to my current doings. Well, OK, with one of my recent changes, now, it occurs to me I could keep a remote backup at my BF's house and could set a weekly update schedule. But right now money is tight again. Maybe in the spring or summer when I don't have to spend virtually all my non-rent and non-food money on heating oil and other necessities (like the one PRIMARY backup).
One good reason to have an offsite backup: Some major thing happens to your home - fire, burglary, lightning strike, flood (can you say "Brisbane"? I knew you could), etc and wipes out all your machines in one swipe. Now you're toast.
I had been using Mozy, but it started getting wonky so I've just started backing up using CrashPlan to a remote machine at my inlaw's home several states away. I like CrashPlan because it's cross-platform and they offer both secure remote backup to their servers for a small fee, AND secure remote backup to *any friend's computer* for FREE. (you can also use it to backup to an attached disk or to another machine on your local network). You can choose any or all methods.
So you can do a full backup to an external drive, then take it over to someone else's house and start doing incremental backups to it there every night. That's essentially what I set up at my inlaws' over the holiday visit there.
If there's ever major data loss here I can either pull the important stuff back over the 'net or simply have them ship the external drive back to me overnight and then load it in locally. I've done some test restoration, and so far everything looks good. I've yet to try a full restore from the remote over the internet, but that'll happen soon.
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