I've had some problems with data loss recently, so when my backup strategy has started getting iffy I've realised I need to rethink what I currently do.

Anyone want to share their plan?

To start the ball rolling:

My PC's music / documents / pictures / videos are synced with my Microserver every hour using SyncToy.

My PC's SSD has a system image (using Windows backup) every week copied to the Microserver

The documents on my laptop (Windows partition) are synced with the my Microserever every hour, when in Windows (Windows <-> Mac file synchronisation software suggestions appreciated) using SyncToy.

My laptop (OSX partition) backs up using Time Machine to my Microserver.

My Microsever's SSD has a system image (using Windows backup) every week.

All pictures / documents / videos / music on the Microserver are backed up off-site using cloud storage (LiveDrive - but been having problems with this recently).

The Microserver has 4x HDD's (merged into one using DriveBender) with the documents being duplicated across all 4 HDD's.

Films and TV Shows on my Microserver are not backed up.

Absolutely no backup plan

That sounds way too obsessive to me. Mine is very simple. I just copy all my files in my external hard drive



and update them whenever I feel like. It's been 100% effective over the years
I also drop some files in the Google Drive folder if I want to have them available from my phone, that's it.

Usually just control + a and then control + v somewhere else.

Without kidding, I keep my important files synced on my NAS, which is running in RAID 5. So if my main HDD in my PC would crash there's not really much lost since I got all important files also somewhere else.

All TB's of movies and series are obviously not being backed up.

backup? whats that?
ive been planning for years to get an external hdd...still havent yet

No backup except photos and documents/source codes. Media is not worthy backing up, can download anything anytime.

edit: forgot to tell how: I burn photos on DVDs but I think I get some cheap USB key/drive for that as this is a bit uncomfortable.

docs: well the only one I REALLY need is my diploma thesis in-progress. But it's on school servers anyway. Other than that...I don't actually need. Just would make me -bit- sad.

One external HDD and single online storage service site. All 7z'd and taking up 15 GB right now. More important data i have also backed up on two additional USB keys.
I don't use automated backup or sync apps because neither seem to work the way i want it. Instead i created and organized an Excel workbook in which i manually handle backup information.

Seen this program highly recommended, it's free and does the job:
http://www.fbackup.com/
Perhaps someone finds it useful.

Quote from Nilex :

Seen this program highly recommended, it's free and does the job:
http://www.fbackup.com/
Perhaps someone finds it useful.

I'm using that for my 1:1 mirror backups, love it.

I have two WD Black 2TB internal drives connected to an LSI 9260-4i card in a RAID1 configuration.

I have external drive but I've lost the power cord for it. The drive is only 500gb so I can only backup less than half what I'd need for full backup. I have two hard drives on my computer so I just make sure I have copies of important stuff on both disk. A poor man's manual raid1 . If one fails the other one still has the data on it. If both disks die at the same time I'm screwed.

I just bought new computer and the parts should be here this week so I need to rethink my backups as my new computer will only have ssd and one hd plus I don't think there is windows 8 version of the backup software I use (yes I'm getting windows 8).

Absolutely no backup strategy at the moment, I remember though once I backed up some important files on a flash drive but I lost it somehow so I can't be bothered anymore

Quote from Specht77 :

Absolutely no backup plan

I used to have no backup. Then my water-loop dripped onto my HD, effectively destroying everything I'd done in the past four years, including all my photos of my son.

Luckily, it turned out that only the circuit-board was damaged and I was able to buy a near-identical drive and just swap them over, but I learned my lesson.


I dug out an old 500GB drive and now use that plus Cobian Backup to sync My Documents, My Music, plus a few other odds and ends to it a couple of times a week.

The 4 or 5 documents I really need to keep and a few bits of uni work are uploaded to a couple of places, and I really don't care about the rest of my stuff, I don't really have anything worth backing up, pretty much everything is just streamed now.

Important documents (but none with important personal data) are stored on my dropbox.

Other Documents, Music and Photos on one external drive (plus most of it duplicated on my laptop), Movies and Series on another.

Once a week Windows sets a restore point on a second small internal HD installed solely for Backups. The last restore point gets deleted. Just saved my ass a few days ago when a driver update caused havoc.

Thats pretty much it, but I like to store financial stuff etc. in printed form. I don't do online banking

I had two partitions on my former computer so I kept everything cool in one and the other was there in case of a virus annihilation... It worked for years since the HD never really died.

Then I got a new computer and it didn't have partitions so I just kept everything everywhere, then I was given an external 1TB drive but I didn't back up anything until approximately one month ago when I formatted the computer with some 5 years of pictures etc.

I'm glad I did that, there was one time when I dreamt that I lost my entire music folder, that was a huge nightmare.

Great to see different options adapted here. So far I've only copied off important stuff onto my dads laptop, and have some of that stuff in two places on my single internal drive.

I don't have ton of important stuff to be backed up, its just that it would be really annoying to lose some of the stuff.

I need to at least get an external HDD though.

Quote from Forbin :

I have two WD Black 2TB internal drives connected to an LSI 9260-4i card in a RAID1 configuration.

RAID isn't a backup strategy.

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

RAID isn't a backup strategy.

Not strictly speaking, no. It's data redundancy that protects against hardware failure, but not software issues. I generally have more problems with the former than the latter.