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Ask HN: What service do you use for personal file backup?
My Mozy subscription is about to end. I thought the overall service was good, but sometimes unreliable or slow. I'm trying to decide if I should renew or go elsewhere. What other backup services do you recommend?
- vaksel 17y agonone really, I just backup on DVDs every 3-4 months, the folders that change over that period.
- agotterer 17y agoI do that as well. But there's always that small chance or fire or theft. I also like having incremental backups that are taken every night. Just in case a file gets accidentally modified/deleted or corrupted. Better safe then sorry, and for $50ish bucks a year it easily justified.
- aberman 17y agoI use dropbox for everything. I can't imagine a better solution.
- agotterer 17y agoI also use dropbox. Its fantastic for sharing. But to me its not a real backup solution. Everything doesnt live in the same folders or drives, seems like a lot of work to turn dropbox into a half baked backup solution.
- swolchok 17y agoYou can start by moving things into Dropbox and symlinking them back to their original locations. Can't help you if you're on Windows.
- edb 17y agoJungledisk! It allows you to store all yor data on your s3 account
- agotterer 17y agoThis comes out to slightly higher then my Mozy account would cost per month. Does Jungledisk do any encryption or protection for you? I know Mozy encrypts everything.
- rgrove 17y agoBe careful with Mozy. If you haven't done a test restore, I strongly recommend you try one now. The Mozy restore process is extremely broken and has been for years. You can read about my horrible experience with Mozy (and the horrible experiences of hundreds of commenters) here: http://wonko.com/post/it_turns_out_mozy_isnt_so_hot_after_all http://wonko.com/post/it_turns_out_mozy_isnt_so_hot_after_al...
- agotterer 17y agoAfter some more research it appears jungledisk is the best option. I have never had to do a restore from Mozy, but the reviews and horror stories are enough to turn me off. Thanks everyone!
- dryicerx 17y agoAmazon S3. cron job -> tar gz -> s3cmd -> s3 Their cheap, very reliable, and fast. What else can I ask for.
- cperciva 17y agoWhat else can I ask for? How about faster, cheaper, and more flexible? If you back up the same or overlapping sets of files, tarsnap's snapshotting functionality will probably result in it using less bandwidth (and thus end up being cheaper) than a raw tar | gzip | s3 approach.
- dryicerx 17y agoThe --newer switch does the trick
- whatusername 17y ago--newer woks at the file level - I believe that tarsnap works at the block level. So depending on the nature of changes - tarsnap (or anything else block based) would likely still be more efficient.
- cperciva 17y agoIncremental archives via 'tar --newer' are better than just storing complete archives each time, but they fail compared to tarsnap in two important ways: 1. If you modify a file and then perform a backup, you'll store the entire new file rather than only the parts of the file which changed; and 2. If you modify a file and then perform a backup, you now have two copies of that file stored, and you have to continue paying to store both copies even if you only care about the most recent version of the file.
- dryicerx 17y agoPoint taken. Of course you are comparing a full personal backup solution meant specifically for this task to a one liner :) But for my purposes as personal data backup, I just wouldn't see a speed or price difference of that type of efficiency.
- redmage 17y agoI use tarsnap[1] and not-so-regular backups to my home fileserver. [1] http://tarsnap.com http://tarsnap.com
- rgaidot 17y agordiff-backup distance (via ssh)
- KB 17y agoI prefer my Apple Time Capsule. Wireless backup, runs in the background whenever my MBP is up, fixed up front cost, and all my data stays on my own network.
- Vitaly 17y agoastrails-safe (http://blog.astrails.com/2009/4/6/simple-backups-can-be-simple http://blog.astrails.com/2009/4/6/simple-backups-can-be-simp...): runs from cron, archives files and mysql databases (and more), encrypts with gpg and uploads to amazon s3
- dazzawazza 17y agoEverything I care about goes in to an offsite SVN repository.
- kailoa 17y agoFor just about everything non-media, I use mercurial to a colosite. Works fantastic. Big media files (movies, iTunes Library, etc.) are backed up locally to a big data server.
- Elepsis 17y agoSugarSync, though I also use it to keep files in sync between PCs.
- catone 17y agoI've been very happy with SugarSync. I also back up my most important files to a couple of USB thumb drives.
- mrinterweb 17y agoTime Machine on mac, Back in Time on Linux. Both are great. I backup to a network drive. If you are using a mac, and you want to use time machine, don't waste your money on their time capsule product. To find out how to use time machine with a non-apple backup resource, look into sparse bundles.
- mustpax 17y agoI make bootable clones of my laptop hdd with SuperDuper. I use 2 drives and an external SCSI drive enclosure for this. This way, I have a weekly copy and a daily copy. And when my laptop hdd fails I can switch over to a good copy with no downtime. I also use Dropbox for a certain subset of my documents, so that adds another layer of backups w/ partial rollback as well. Online backups are good, but an external SCSI enclosure costs at most $40 + the cost of an internal drive, which is cheaper, and allows faster recovery.
- ballen 17y agoJungledisk for my laptop, Duplicity -> Amazon S3 for servers.
- rgrove 17y agoCrashPlan. I've got it backing up all my machines to a Drobo on my LAN as well as remotely to CrashPlan's servers, encrypted before it crosses the wire, and it costs me $5 a month. Been using it for years and have done several very large restores and it's worked like a charm.
- mjh 17y agorsync.net has been fantastic over the years, I use them and several of my clients do as well. No first level support, straight to an engineer. Plus discounts for open source projects, students, etc. In addition to their own backup agent; they support rsync, scp, sftp, ftp, rdiff-backup, Unison, duplicity, svn+ssh, WebDAV and any other combination or concoction you can come up with. Plus, they have a ToS agreement that can't be beat: http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/tos.html http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/tos.html
- smithjchris 17y ago2x 16Gb USB sticks and TrueCrypt. I don't keep anything immediately replacable (like media).