Agreed 100%, home PC back-ups are not optional in this day and age. Our home computer contains pretty much the entire record of my 2-year-old's life in photo and video. If we lost that to a hard drive crash, I'd never forgive myself (not to mention what my wife would have to say).
With software like Time Machine, an on-site backup is nearly automatic, and I've had an archive up and running on a separate server for the past two years. My next step is putting together an off-site backup system, in case of fire, burglary or natural disaster. My plan is to buy a couple of spare drives and leave one at an out-of-state family member's house, rotating them out when we visit for holidays.
Got a Time Capsule last fall, started backing up my macbook and didn't think about it after that. Working in the background, automatically, over wifi with a setup of minutes. Used it for the first time last week to recover a file. Paid for itself right there and then.
As an alternative to you holiday off-site backup plan, you could checkout backblaze.com. I haven't tried the service yet, but they offer unlimited backup space for $5/mo.or $50/year. The only reason I haven't tried this is I'm just not sure how long that initial upload would take, what with 500+ gigs of stuff to backup :)
If you used to augment your full backup though, it would be a good last resort, failsafe backup
Good call on the offsite backup. I do something very similar to your idea.
I rented a safe deposit box at my bank, and every month or so I head over and get access to it to swap out my hard drives with the latest backup. That way even if the house burns down, etc., I'm covered.
It's low-tech, but it scales quite well. I can store multiple terabytes at a secure, offsite location for about $50 / year.
Idea for an enterprising entrepreneur: create an app that does a multi-site/format backup. You decide which folders/file-pattern go to the cloud i.e. Dropbox and which go to your external HD. I have almost 300GB of videos and pictures of the kids that I don't want backed up to the cloud (too expensive and too time consuming). However I also have ~500MB of text files, word docs, tax forms (pdf's printed from Turbotax online) that would be perfect to backup to the cloud since that wouldn't take any time at all.
Then this software would automate this so that anytime I add new pictures/videos, it would automatically go to the external HD. Anytime I create/update a word doc it automatically gets uploaded/synced to Dropbox. Perhaps the backup software could watch certain folders and automate the backups for me so I don't even have to think about it. Heck I might even pick-up C# and learn me some Windows programming.
My wife and kids all have Dropbox accounts. I spent a little time training them to save everything important to "My Dropbox" instead. Works great for smaller stuff.
It'll back up whichever folders you choose to your own S3 account, which is very fast and reliable. It backs up and restores all Mac metadata corrrectly, stores versioned backups (like Time Machine), fully encrypted, has drag-and-drop restore, de-duplication, no limits on file sizes or drive types.
Currently I use a BackupPC system on the LAN to do nightly backups of all my systems. My mac mini is backed up automatically via Time Machine as well, and I do a nightly backup of the MacBook with SuperDuper. Setup of rsyncd on the one windows laptop is a bit of a pain, but it works well.
My current concern is off-site backups. I have none, and need something. The problem is that I can't backup the BackupPC pool (~700G of backups) and since I'm horrible about determining what to save and throw away I end up keeping everything. I think I'm hosed :)
I just got an Acer Windows Home Server machine. It does complete machine level backups of all the home/office PCs.
I found it very easy to set up and has given me piece of mind at last!
I hope I'm wrong but it sounds suspiciously like all your backups are in one physical location. You may well be protected against an individual drive failing but what about a more calamitous event such as a fire or flooding?
[+] [-] URSpider94|16 years ago|reply
With software like Time Machine, an on-site backup is nearly automatic, and I've had an archive up and running on a separate server for the past two years. My next step is putting together an off-site backup system, in case of fire, burglary or natural disaster. My plan is to buy a couple of spare drives and leave one at an out-of-state family member's house, rotating them out when we visit for holidays.
[+] [-] icefox|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrwoodruff|16 years ago|reply
If you used to augment your full backup though, it would be a good last resort, failsafe backup
[+] [-] quickpost|16 years ago|reply
I rented a safe deposit box at my bank, and every month or so I head over and get access to it to swap out my hard drives with the latest backup. That way even if the house burns down, etc., I'm covered.
It's low-tech, but it scales quite well. I can store multiple terabytes at a secure, offsite location for about $50 / year.
[+] [-] stuff4ben|16 years ago|reply
Then this software would automate this so that anytime I add new pictures/videos, it would automatically go to the external HD. Anytime I create/update a word doc it automatically gets uploaded/synced to Dropbox. Perhaps the backup software could watch certain folders and automate the backups for me so I don't even have to think about it. Heck I might even pick-up C# and learn me some Windows programming.
[+] [-] ja27|16 years ago|reply
Maybe Dropbox needs a family plan?
[+] [-] FraaJad|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jreposa|16 years ago|reply
Besides Drobo, anyone have other suggestions?
[+] [-] sreitshamer|16 years ago|reply
It'll back up whichever folders you choose to your own S3 account, which is very fast and reliable. It backs up and restores all Mac metadata corrrectly, stores versioned backups (like Time Machine), fully encrypted, has drag-and-drop restore, de-duplication, no limits on file sizes or drive types.
[+] [-] rarrrrrr|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bcl|16 years ago|reply
My current concern is off-site backups. I have none, and need something. The problem is that I can't backup the BackupPC pool (~700G of backups) and since I'm horrible about determining what to save and throw away I end up keeping everything. I think I'm hosed :)
[+] [-] andrewdavey|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] streety|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nishantmodak|16 years ago|reply
is it just me who does this way?
[+] [-] wallingf|16 years ago|reply