A good backup serves a few purposes. It should help you recover from accidentally deleted files, a crashed hard drive or something as serious as a site-wide catastrophe. But the only way to ensure that last one is to keep a backup offsite. Do you bother?
There are a lot of options for keeping an backup offsite? You can use an online backup service; we’ve even rounded up our five favourites. Some of them let you store full backups of your computers online. Others, like CrashPlan, provide a little more flexibility, letting you also perform local or network backups and even backing up to the computer of another person using CrashPlan.
If you’re hesitant to back up online, you can also use DVDs or external hard drives that you store in another location. So, what about you? Share your backup routine with us in the comments.
Comments
4 responses to “Do You Keep An Offsite Backup?”
Sure do. I have a rule that I need 3 backups. 2 local and one offsite. Having crappy upload speeds for ADSL2+ (at 700kbps) an online solution really doesn’t work for me because it just takes forever and eats my quota. I have a couple of portable HDDs sitting at my parents place… you know just in case my house burns down.
I have regular daily backups to a NAS (same site, but obviously physically separate). This is full system images as well as data.
That said, all my important documents are also backed up to Skydrive (or whatever it may soon be called) – it gives me the flexibility to access files remotely if needed, as well as ensure that a crash is less painful.
All files stored on NAS (dual disks) locally. I used Crashplan to store critical files from the NAS on a USB drive connected to another machine, as well as backing up those files to the Crashplan cloud.
Daily critical data gets synced and versioned to AWS.
I also do weekly full-system image backups to rotating set of 3 x USB HDD’s that I store in my desk drawer at work. The rule being that at NO TIME are all the backups ever in the same place.
Agree the 3.. 2.. 1 Rule is an excellent data philosophy to live by.
http://dpbestflow.org/backup/backup-overview#321
I let the American NSA back up my data for me. If I ever lose data I can have a friend in New York do an FOI request on my behalf.