Who's got one?

I'm (very overdue) looking to set up a backup strategy for our laptop, which basically stores all our stuff - mainly photos that would be devastating to lose. Whilst I would most like to set up a server to backup to, and then get an online service to backup that to, at the moment we have just a laptop and a spare 1TB external drive (which dwarfs the hard disk on the laptop)

• Windows Vista based
• Free (as in beer) preferred
• Backup to a not-always-on external drive (Yes, I know this will only save me from hard disk failure unlike an off-site solution, and it won't save what's happened since the last backup. I can accept both of these)
• Scheduled nag to connect the drive and start a backup
• Doing an incremental backup

Any suggestions? Also, share your backup strategies. Any experiences with the online backup services would be interesting to hear.

I don't have a specific backup plan.

I keep all of my files in repositories, which end up being (incidentally, not methodically) checked out on 3 different computers across 7 different OS installs. So that works out to approximately 8 backup copies of all of my files.

I set this up for my convenience, because I work on enough different machines and operating systems that it'd be impossible to keep track of things otherwise.

I don't have a backup plan for my home server though. It'd suck to lose the history, but I don't really care enough to do anything about it. It's on a UPS, that's probably enough.

A great backup plan can be summed up in two words:


Hard Copy

I back up my home directory every 3 or 4 weeks, which takes care of my photos and music. All my work is on my dropbox which spreads it across two physical machines (on my laptop it's also copied once on each of its two partitions) as well as Dropbox's servers.

I manually back up important files such as documents or photos on CD or DVD (depending on the amount of data a acquired) about once per month. I don't back up most media (e.g: music or movies) because I mostly just stream things.

The most critical files, namely work information, school information/classwork, and taxes all reside on my dropbox, so they're on many of my computers, and in the cloud. Also, my entire home directory is backed up to an external every night, which includes the above.

I also have a bazillion photos, so those are on my laptop, an external, and uploaded to picasa as another backup. I don't do it often though, as picasa is terribly bad with iPhoto. Also doesn't help that there is gigs of photos, and my upload speed is criminally low.

Finally, for anyone curious, Massassi is backed up on a 2 day schedule to a local directory, which protects from user stupidity. From there, that backup is occasionally uploaded to Amazon S3 as a proper backup solution.

I do automated daily differential backups of every computer in my house onto a big file server. Screw doing it manually.

I don't have anything worth backing up!

I put stuff on an external HD every 6 months to a year.

USB jump drive.

Everything but movies and tv shows I compress and backup to an external every few months or so.

Manually write 1s and 0s on a giant piece of paper.

I figure if video production and editing doesn't work out, old ladies appreciate the novelty of a midget stripper. I guess I'd have to work on changing more sexily and quickly though, eh.

Oh.... data.

I have lost data before and still haven't set up an effective backup mechanism. I'm lazy.

I meant like actually print your documents and photos. Vid's could go on a DVD (or one of those cool VHS converters, lol), music to a cd, etc.

But hey, I guess the 1's & 0's could work too... if you don't mind retyping miles of codes.

lol

Look at him go with his tiny shirt button rod things!

snap buttons!

For anything I care about I use git to maintain a few repositories mirrored onto an external host and github.

My netbook is basically a dumb terminal, anything I work on with it is just a working copy I can then pull down and push back out when I'm done, so regardless of if I use a different laptop or such the "real" copy of things are on the WAN.

For IRC/IM, I run bitlbee+IRSSI+screen on a home server that I can ssh into from wherever so I never have to worry about maintaining log files in different places, and then every 6 hours a cron job kicks off to git add/commit/push any changes [including its own configuration files/settings] to another repo on the above hosts.

So as a result my default mode is "backed up" and any time I want to reload my laptop I don't have to worry about if I might lose something or make sure to back up first; once the installer's done, I just pull down whatever I want to work on and keep going.

I also use irssi+screen on a home server for IRC. It's great if you have the hardware for it.

Half-terabyte portable hard drive once a week, if I'm paying attention; all relevant photographs and school drawing files exist on at least two high-capacity flash drives.
Extra-sooper-important stuff gets attached to an email I send to myself through Google, and Free probably also has a copy in his inbox.

Speaking of Free and completely off topic, he is actually making mashed potatoes right now. With real potatoes and a masher-thingy. Lemme' hear y'all say 'awwwwwwwwwwww...'