Good Secure Backups Developers at Home [closed]

Answer 1

My vote goes to dirvish (for linux). It uses rsync as backend but is very easy to configure. It makes automatic, periodically and differential backups of directories. The big benefit is, that it creates hardlinks to all files not changed since the last backup. So restore is easy: Just copy last created directory back - instead of restoring all diffs one after another like other differential backup tools need to do.

Answer 2

Or simply just set up a gmail account and mail it to yourself :) Unless you're a bit paranoid about google knowing about your stuff since you said research. It doesn't help you much with structure and stuff but it's free, big storage and off-site so quite safe.

Answer 3

If you use OS X 10.5 or above then the cost of Time Machine is the cost of an external hard drive. Not only that, but the interface is dead simple to use. Open the folder you wish to recover, click on the time machine icon, and browse the directory as if it was 1999 all over again!

I haven't tried to encrypt it, but I imagine you could use truecrypt.

Yes this answer was posted quite some time after the question was asked, however I believe it should help those who stumble across this posting in the future (like I did).

Answer 4

My vote goes for cloud storage of some kind. The problem with nearly all 'home' backups is they stay in the home, that means any catastrophic damage to the system being backed up will probably damage the backups as well (fire, flood etc). My requirements would be

1) automated - manual backups get forgotten, usually just when most needed

2) off-site - see above

3) multiple versions - that is backup to more than one thing, in case that one thing fails.

As a developer, usually data sizes for backup are relatively small so a couple of free cloud backup accounts might do. They also often fulfil part 1 as they can usually be automated. I've heard good things about www.getdropbox.com/.

The other advantage of more than 1 account is you could have one on 'daily sync' and another on 'weekly sync' to give you some history. This is nowhere near as good as true incremental backups.

Personally I prefer a scripted backup (to local hard-drives, which I rotate to work as 'offsites'. This is in large part due to my hobby (photography) and thus my relatively lame internet upstream bandwith not coping with the data volume.

Take home message - don't rely on one solution and don't assume that your data is not important enough to think about the issues as deeply as the 'Enterprise' does.

Answer 5

These are interesting times for "the personal backup question".

There are several schools of thought now:

1. Frequent Automated Local Backup + Periodic Local Manual Backup

   Automated: Scheduled Nightly backup to external drive.
   Manual: Copy to second external drive once per week / month / year / oops-forgot
   and drop it of at "Mom's house".
    
   Lot's of software in the field, but here's a few: There's RSync and TimeMachine on Mac, and DeltaCopy www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp for Windows.

2. Frequent Remote Backup

   There are a pile of services that enable you to backup across you internet connection to a remote data centre. Amazon's S3 service + JungleDisk's client software is a strong choice these days - not the cheapest option, but you pay for what you use and Amazon's track record suggests as a company it will be in business as long or longer than any other storage providers who hang their shingle today.
    
   Did I mention it should be encrypted? Props to JungleDisk for handling the "encryption issue" and future-proofing (open source library to interoperate with Jungle Disk) pretty well.

3. All of the above.

   Some people call it being paranoid ... others think to themselves "Ahhh, I can sleep at night now".

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Also, it's more fault-tolerance than backup, but you should check out Drobo - basically it's dead simple RAID that seems to work quite well.