Backing up your computer

[Rossandjet]

I must admit, I find backing up my computer a very tiresome but necessary chore, and although I do it every month, I know it should be more frequent. I use EaseUS Todo and back up onto a 2TB portable hard drive

Can I ask others, please what regime and software they use for backing up? Do you backup the full computer, just your files, or incremental backups.

Thank you

 

[Philtrum]

Being a Mac user for years, I’ve been using Time Machine, backing up to a network hard drive. It’s really well integrated with MacOS, though to be honest I’ve never tried to restore anything major (yes I know you should test backups but life’s too short.)

Key files that I really cannot afford to lose get saved to a USB drive or two that live in the safe.

Time Machine normally takes a whole backup then does several versions of files.

 

[root]

I have a terrible backup strategy of dumping everything into Onedrive. I used to run a home server that I copied files to and when mechanical hard drives were a thing I was a lot more religous about backing up data. I’ve only had one SSD fail on me since they became a thing and that was an el-cheapo random Amazon brand.

I mostly use cloud services for day to day computing - I do my day job through a virtual desktop, so my workspace is the same whether I’m at home or in the office.

My email is online, I don’t do a great deal of word processing, spreadsheets or anything like that when I’m off the clock. I rely on iCloud for photo storage. If I’m doing any serious work, this is done on my Shadow cloud PC along with any gaming as most of my computers are fairly low end.

I like to be in a situation where if my PC died tomorrow, I could pick up where I left off on another machine with no real delay. I do put my trust in cloud services continuing to run which might be a bad strategy but hope for the best.

On the other hand I do take a bit more care of things such as this very site - the forum database (e.g all of the posts) has a daily overnight backup to a different datacentre, and a snapshot of the entire server - forum software and underlying operating system, is taken every 2 days so should something bad happen we won’t lose more than a day’s worth of posts.

 

[Rossandjet]

Thank you for your answers.
At 82 I still have a trust issue with anything that is not powered by gears and pullies as being at the mercy of todays undesirables. To trust my video clips to be stored in one of the clouds is still quite a way off for me. Most free cloud options are limited to about 15GB and even the subscribed 100GB options are gobbled up very quickly with the size of video clip files of which I have in the region of 900, trusted to two 2TB Seagate Backup plus portable drives (that I treat with kid gloves) and a 250GB Samsung SSD.

 

[root]

I think this is a perfectly valid point. For your use case I would absolutely be sticking to local storage.

I’m not a great photographer and I’ve never really got into video - think the last time I made any sort of video was on a Mini DV camera and getting that onto a PC was a challenge to say the least.

I do have a consious ‘choice’ about which clouds I use. Microsoft I trust with mostly work stuff, former business files, important documents etc. Only Apple get my photos, which I keep a local copy of on a couple of my PCs.

Eventually I will look into either bringing my home server back online or finding a more modern solution that’s a bit kinder to my electricity bill to run.

I’m fortunate enough to benefit from 100Meg upload speeds on my home broadband so the cloud does work well for me, though when my contract comes up with BT this will be reduced as I barely make use of the superfast connection, so I imagine the cost saving will pay nicely for some sort of NAS drive - I will report my experience if I do go for one of these!

 

[Philtrum]

@Rossandjet I’m with you on this one, do not trust the cloud services at all. Too many of them have come and gone, got hacked and other things over the years.