Recommend me a backup solution

Hoseman

I'm interested in a backup solution and wanted some recommendations.

Im looking into this for a friend and her needs aren't massive from a size point of view and there are a few things she needs to backup for her work like documents and Outlook (emails, calendar, notes, etc.).

There is an external hard disk as an option but I was wondering if there was anything else like in the cloud that works in the background. Something that isn't very intrusive, is secure and you set/forget it.

Any ideas/suggestions?

grumpycrab

Sticky: Backing Up (1 2 3 ... Last Page)

Cloud mechanisms are good for real-time backups (for lowish amounts of data) e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive. (Outlook may be fidly -as in working out where the files are actually stored OR Outlook.com is surely integrated with Skydrive by now? Sorry don't know about that one).

I assume your friend already has a full system image backup done in case of disk failure? (e.g. Macrium Reflect or Windows Backup).

securityguy

Crashplan.

I_have_spoken

I used MozyHome, free for 2Gb or a fiver a month for 50Gb. If it's work related, cost may be tax-deductible.

Jivesinger

Hoseman wrote: »

Im looking into this for a friend and her needs aren't massive from a size point of view and there are a few things she needs to backup for her work like documents and Outlook (emails, calendar, notes, etc.).

It may be different in newer versions of Outlook, but the older version I have, all the emails, calendar etc. are kept in one file. As the file size builds up, then every time an email arrives, the Outlook file will appear to change, and the whole file would be copied to the cloud by a backup solution.

Not such a problem if you have unlimited data usage but worth considering if not.

securityguy

Jivesinger wrote: »

As the file size builds up, then every time an email arrives, the Outlook file will appear to change, and the whole file would be copied to the cloud by a backup solution.

It wouldn't for Mozy or Crashplan, and I doubt it would for their competitors: they do block-level de-duplication, and therefore have a very low overhead for unchanged blocks.

Jivesinger

securityguy wrote: »

It wouldn't for Mozy or Crashplan, and I doubt it would for their competitors: they do block-level de-duplication, and therefore have a very low overhead for unchanged blocks.

Ah fair enough - I didn't realise they were that clever.

securityguy

Jivesinger wrote: »

Ah fair enough - I didn't realise they were that clever.

There are probably some pathological cases, but in general de-dup matches real-world usage pretty well. Identical files are only backed up once. If a file isn't identical to others that have already been backed up, it's examined block by block and only the blocks that haven't been sent before (either from this file or from another file) are sent. There's some magic to cope with misalignment (ie, if two files are identical bar one having a short prelude that isn't block-aligned) too. The problem with de-dup is it can be savagely expensive in CPU terms at the sending end and it's often a tuning parameter to say just how much CPU you're prepared to burn to avoid sending 64k, but if there's one thing you're never short of in 2014 it's CPU capacity at the backup client.

[[ Crashplan can be a bit tricky in very memory poor environments, because de-dup also includes building big tables of blocks you've already seen. I run it inside a Linux virtual machine that only has 256M of RAM, and the initial backup was very painful. Luckily that machine is sat on a GigE internet connection, so I decided to accept more bandwidth use in exchange for less memory consumption. But seriously, who's going to run in 256MB of RAM in 2014? ]]

SteveJW

A month ago realising I did not have any form of backup solution, I carried out some research on the web and came up with

http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/free-backup-software.htm

It appears to do what I want

You can pick the directories you wish to backup and the location to backup to, memory stick, external drive or second internal drive. I suppose if I backup to my dropbox folder it will automatically uploaded

The options in the free version are
Full backup
Incremental backup

I have it setup to backup My Documents and My emails, every three days it does a full backup and then for the next two days an incremental backup. It preserves the last three full backups and then when it writes the fourth it deletes the earliest

I have tested the backups by restoring to another machine

Hoseman

Thanks for all the responses.

Im thinking of choosing Crashplan. Does anyone actually use it and have any further info they can add like ease of use to set up and how easy it is to restore data if something goes wrong?

bluesnake

the only problem with things like CrashPlan, is that you need a working version of windows to restore too, and a working internet.

I would go with http://redobackup.org/, or clonzilla, or Macrium Reflect, or possibly todo, - something that creates a bootable cd/stick to restore from.

If you do not have your own system backup, you end up reinstalling windows, setting up the network, and then installing crashplan just to get your files back.