Good Secure Backups Developers at Home [closed]

Answer 1

I highly recommend www.mozy.com. Their software is easy and works great, and since it's stored on their servers you implicitly get offsite backups. No worrying about running a backup server and making sure it's working. Also, the company is backed by EMC (a leading data storage product company), so gives me enough confidence to trust them.

Answer 2

Here are the features I'd look out for:

• As near to fully automatic as possible. If it relies on you to press a button or run a program regularly, you will get bored and eventually stop bothering. An hourly cron job takes care of this for me; I rsync to the 24x7 server I run on my home net.
• Multiple removable backup media so you can keep some off site (and/or take one with you when you travel). I do this with a warm-pluggable SATA drive bay and a cron job which emails me every week to remind me to change drives.
• Strongly encrypted media, in case you lose one. The linux encrypted device support (cryptsetup et al) does this for me.
• Some sort of point-in-time recovery, but consider carefully what resolution you want. Daily might be enough - having multiple backup media probably gets you this - or you might want something more comprehensive like Apple's Time Machine. I've used some careful rsync options with my removable drives: every day creates a fresh snapshot directory, but files which are unchanged from the previous day are hard linked instead of copied, to save space.

Answer 3

I second the vote for JungleDisk. I use it to push my documents and project folders to S3. My average monthly bill from amazon is about 20c.

All my projects are in Subversion on an external host.

As well as this, I am on a Mac, so I use SuperDuper to take a nightly image of my drive. I am sure there are good options in the Windows/Linux world.

I have two external drives that I rotate on a weekly basis, and I store one of the drives off-site during it's week off.

This means that I am only ever 24 hours away from an image in case of failure, and I am only 7 days from an image in case of catastrophic failure (fire theft). The ability to plug the drive in to a machine and be running instantly from the image has saved me immensely. My boot partition was corrupted during a power failure (not a hardware failure, luckily). I plugged the backup in, restored and was working again in the time it took to transfer the files of the external drive.

Answer 4

Another vote for mozy.com

You get 2gb for free, or for $5/month gives you unlimited backup space. Backups can occur on a timed basis, or when your PC/Mac is not busy. It's encrypted during transit and storage.

You can retrieve files via built in software, through the web or pay for a DVD to be burned and posted back.

William Macdonald

Answer 5

mozy.com is king. I started using it just to backup code and then ponied up the 5 bux a month to backup my personal pictures and other stuff that I'd rather not lose if the house burns down. The initial backup can take a little while but after that you can pretty much forget about it until you need to restore something.

Answer 6

If you're using deduplicaiton STAY AWAY from JungleDisk. Their restore client makes a mess of the reparsepoint, and makes the file unusable. You hopefully can fix it in safe mode with:

fsutil reparsepoint delete