Where in the home are your backups?

sickofusernames

Personally I have two lots of backups on different machines, the main weekly backups on a 10 year old eMachines 2240 in the hallway connected to my wireless router running Freenas and an Advent 9608 (shockingly loud psu fan whatever the load!) which I fire up every now and then situated behind the lounge AV unit.

But what happens if the house burns down? Precious baby and memorable photos are something I would never want to lose so it doesn't matter how many backups you have you still may lose everything. I'd love to hear from anyone who has any cheap ideas to get around a catastrophic event regarding data - I guess fireproof safes would be really expensive? Oh, and I don't want to hear about "The Cloud" please.

globalds

X marks the spot

sickofusernames

Lol, I was thinking of the garden shed myself but is that a bit extreme? It sometimes pays to be cautious.

HappyMJ

Upload important stuff to the internet. I use Dropbox myself.

sickofusernames

HappyMJ wrote: »

Upload important stuff to the internet. I use Dropbox myself.

That's ok but you're limited to a relatively small free allowance, and I did specify no "cloud" options :-)

I use Dropbox myself for important stuff like passwords etc, as much as I don't like doing it, it's the only easy option at present as I don't want to install encryption tools on all my devices.

jaydeeuk1

Raid 1 NAS drive and dropbox for home stuff. And because I'm terrified of losing data at work, especially as its of the Govt kind, I have db backups/mirrors spanning 6 servers across 3 sites taken every hour which also houses some of my own stuff. Not sure what I'm supposed to do yet if something does blow up... Thats a google search I'm hoping I won't need to make

JethroUK

sickofusernames wrote: »

Personally I have two lots of backups on different machines, the main weekly backups on a 10 year old eMachines 2240 in the hallway connected to my wireless router running Freenas and an Advent 9608 (shockingly loud psu fan whatever the load!) which I fire up every now and then situated behind the lounge AV unit.

But what happens if the house burns down? Precious baby and memorable photos are something I would never want to lose so it doesn't matter how many backups you have you still may lose everything. I'd love to hear from anyone who has any cheap ideas to get around a catastrophic event regarding data - I guess fireproof safes would be really expensive? Oh, and I don't want to hear about "The Cloud" please.

Just burn them to dvd - about 10p

All my files are synchronised on the cloud and 4 other computers
Then every week I burn to dvd and write the date on

Anyone would be crazy to rely on any one pc for back up

tronator

sickofusernames wrote: »

Oh, and I don't want to hear about "The Cloud" please.

What's wrong with "The Cloud" when you encrypt your files before you upload it?

I have 50GB web space with my web hosing package, where my website uses only a very tiny fraction of that. I use Duplicati to upload my (encrypted) files.

Otherwise you could leave an external hard disk with a relative or friend.

skivenov

Everyting (full system image) goes to an external drive under the desk that gets turned on once a week for that purpose.

Important stuff is sat in my home directory on our webserver somewhere over the pond.

UsernameAlreadyExists

sickofusernames wrote: »

I guess fireproof safes would be really expensive?

"Expensive" depends on your budget.
Firesafes are relatively inexpensive IMO, but they're not secure. you can get into most quickly and easily. They protect against fire though for their rated periods.
Google "Sentry", they're pretty common.

"Security" safes are safer, but their fire rating isn't anywhere near as high.

sickofusernames

JethroUK wrote: »

Just burn them to dvd - about 10p

All my files are synchronised on the cloud and 4 other computers
Then every week I burn to dvd and write the date on

Anyone would be crazy to rely on any one pc for back up

I guess that's a cheap option but it's not really automated and ive used DVD backups before for my Toshiba when I needed a restore, only to realise the dvd was cack! Guess I should have tested it could be read but hindsight is a wonderful thing. Oh and would you keep the DVDs in the same place or a fireproof safe?

I'm trying to think of worse case scenario, the suggestions are all good but you have To manually do things to ensure the data is safe, the less effort the better.

As another poster already quoted, multiple site backups are good if you have somewhere else to backup to such as parents, but my dad refuses to get adsl, tightwad.