Most efficient way to back up my "computer"?

dunroving

I say "computer", but actually I mean "all my sh*t that is on Dropbox"

About 5 years ago I moved to Dropbox (paid version), for many reasons, but the main one being I had my stuff on a remote location that didn't require me to carry around a device (laptop, hard drive). Among other things, I could leave my work laptop at work instead of having to carry it back and forth every day (or not; sometimes I'd forget, resulting in the air being blue)

I also liked the idea (I thought) of not having a physical location for security reasons. If my laptop, or memory stick, was stolen, I'd still have my stuff backed up.

Now it dawns on me (doh) that I could still lose my stuff if something catastrophic happens - for example, one erroneous keystroke and I could accidentally delete something (or everything!)

Currently have dragged all the contents on Dropbox (> 120k files, > 70 GB) onto a Buffalo external hard drive, and it's telling me it will take at least a day to complete the transfer of all these files. The HD has 500GB of space, so I assume the time is due to (a) the amount of sh*t I am transferring, and (b) maybe a slow HD, or slow connection (I think it is USB 2.0, but no sure.)

There must be a better (faster, easier) way to back up everything, surely? I don't want to pay for another cloud storage solution ...

Head_The_Ball

A day sounds very slow but I don't know about Dropbox download speeds.

I suggest that you continue to back up to the hard disk, splitting into short sessions by only selecting say 10% of the total number of files at a time if it really will take a day in total.

When the backup is complete, you could consider getting a second disk and copying the contents from the first disk onto the second disk.

Keep one disk at home and one elsewhere, perhaps at work or at a friends or relatives house. Keep them both up to date.

Some may consider that the second disk backup is overkill but I make sure I have at least three copies of my important data.

dunroving

It ended up taking only about 3 hours. For the first 30 minutes the estimated time to completion was "at least one day", but it gradually recalibrated and took 3 hours, which for me is doable. I'll just manually back up every month.

I hear what you say about having two back-ups, but TBH, I couldn't be arsed. I take a fatalistic viewpoint that if two sources are lost at the same time, it was meant to be. ;-) [Maybe I'd make a third back-up on a less frequent basis]

Interestingly, my 121,273 files, 70.6 GB source data ended up being 121,271 files and 66.3 GB at the destination. I got two queries about one file name too large, and one file too large for destination drive (Outlook .pst file that was 3 GB) so I just told it to Skip these files.

I figure that, as Dropbox is remote I don't need to physically put the external HD anywhere different than my home ... unless anyone can think of a reason why not(?)

Interestingly, my workplace had a huge fire back in 2003, and two PhD students lost all their work. Their back-ups were in the lab (which was burnt down) and their originals were in the office (which was flooded by fire hoses).

A.Penny.Saved

It might be worth doing a differential backup to cloud so that only changes are backed up rather spending time doing everything. Compression can also be used in such circumstances which also increases speed which for text type stuff should dramatically decrease the size.

Storing an external drive in your home: What if your home gets broken into, a nice external hard drive might be worth stealing. A home fire, hard drive failure.....I have had 3 hard drives fail on me in as many weeks, 2 on one day! These were fairly old drives and they have lasted quite well and all were around 10 years old. They do not build the new drives like they used to do as most new hard drives will not last anywhere near to 10 years.

It might be worth using an external drive in a USB 3.0 dock so that you can quickly remove the drive once the backup is done should help to stop it failing. I have a startech 2 bay usb 3.0 Sata hard drive dock which works quite well. Also it is worth backing up the partition table so that if anything happens to it, it can be easily restored.

takman

dunroving wrote: »

Now it dawns on me (doh) that I could still lose my stuff if something catastrophic happens - for example, one erroneous keystroke and I could accidentally delete something (or everything!)

If you delete something in Dropbox you can simply go to the website and restore the files within 30 days (longer if you have a professional/business account).

dunroving wrote: »

It ended up taking only about 3 hours. For the first 30 minutes the estimated time to completion was "at least one day", but it gradually recalibrated and took 3 hours, which for me is doable. I'll just manually back up every month.

You definitely want to invest in a USB 3.0 drive. My portable USB 3.0 HDD can do 70Gb in around 12 minutes and it isn't nowhere near the fastest one you can get.
If you haven't already you should set dropbox to store all your files locally on your PC's HDD as well so you don't have to download them each time you backup. It will then sync any changes to you PC each time it connects to the internet.

dunroving wrote: »

Interestingly, my 121,273 files, 70.6 GB source data ended up being 121,271 files and 66.3 GB at the destination. I got two queries about one file name too large, and one file too large for destination drive (Outlook .pst file that was 3 GB) so I just told it to Skip these files.

Before your next backup you could reformat your backup drive to NTFS then you will be able to backup the larger file.

SouthUKMan

Head_The_Ball wrote: »

When the backup is complete, you could consider getting a second disk and copying the contents from the first disk onto the second disk.

Some may consider that the second disk backup is overkill but I make sure I have at least three copies of my important data.

Depending on how important you deem the data, keeping three copies is a very sensible idea.

Let me share a quick story. Less than a year ago I had a laptop drive and a 500Gb external backup drive both fail within a week of each other. The external drive was a backup of the laptop - and I did not have another 'just in case' back up.

Thankfully I had bought a new hard drive for the laptop and restored the data before the external drive failed. But there was only four days between the two events. Had I been less lucky, then I would have lost thousands of family pics and videos, and loads of work related data. As a result I now run an automated daily backup onto an external drive, and do a manual monthly back up onto a different drive that I keep in the office.

It's a bit like having travel insurance. You hope you never need it but you also know that at some point in your life you are going to be damn glad you had it!