Backups

[Dust]

Having backups is realy important:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/15/0138204

They lost 13 years of content because they didn't have any proper backups.

As a Homeuser, it might be enough to create a full backup every few weeks on an external hard drive. It is important, that the Backup medium is physically separate from the original, and that someone who intentionally compromises the source can not also influence the backup.

[Noolah]

I use Carbonite for backing up my laptop. It's dirt cheap for what they offer, and I've not had any bother with them. It's quite handy for remote access to files as well. Although I did hear they lost some users data due to a batch of faulty HDD's. I also have data backed up to a portable HDD, though that's always with the laptop, so is only really any use for archival purposes.

[Dust]

I personally use Mac OS X TimeMachine to backup my system drive with my applications and important documents on a second internal drive. (I am aware that this is not secure against major disasters and malicious deletion). My media library is unfortunately not backed up :(

The most important documents are on an external hard drive which I store in an other room.

Network backup seems to be tricky, don't you have speed issues or data loss problems? It depends on the encryption though, and the implementation I guess.

[Xureon]

Damn, poor guys

It's something I'm aware I'm not doing very well... I have two computers, one at home and one where I stay during the week (in my university's city), and I just copy over files between them about once or twice a year. If something bad happened to my main computer,... that probably wouldn't be so good

It will most likely change soonish though as I won't be at the university anymore next year, so some things are bound to change anyway.

[Noolah]

Network backup seems to be tricky, don't you have speed issues or data loss problems? It depends on the encryption though, and the implementation I guess.

Carbonite's mostly set and forget, I expect even my mam could set it up. I'm not sure why I'd have any data loss problems. As for the speed thing, only when it's first setup. I wouldn't want to have to upload 7GB again. But after that it's file changes only. So even my 500MB mail archive takes mere minutes to update. Seems to be quite solid, at least last time I verified the backup was good. I think they were stating that the data is stored using 256 bit AES, and the transfers use 128 bit SSL. Not too worried if they don't, as anything I would mind people nosing through is already encrypted.