I’m working on a little thingey about backups and I’m curious about the community’s backup habits. I’d appreciate if everyone would be willing to fill out this quick poll to help me get some base data to work off of.
Do you currently back up your data?
Yes
No
0voters
What do you back up?
Nothing
Some of my data
All of my data
All files on the system
Full disk image
0voters
How often do you back up?
Hourly
Daily
Weekly
Monthly
Whenever I remember to
0voters
Where do you back up to?
External Disk
Optical Media
NAS
Offsite
Tape
0voters
How often do you test your backups?
Daily
Weekly
Monthly
Quarterly
Annually
Test backups? LOL
0voters
Additionally, if you use any specific software or services, if you could give it a shout-out, that’d be wonderful!
Backup methods vary depending on the importance of my data. Some stuff is backed up locally and with two cloud providers, other stuff local + one cloud, other stuff just cloud.
Being that my pc isn’t my work the only things i bother to backup are game saves, music and photos, everything else can be rebuilt pretty quickly when things go tits up (it has twice before).
I backup my /home directory, with a small set of exclusions for easily replacable data.
While not fully “stateless”, I pretty much treat my OS as disposable. I keep copies of configs inside my /home directory and use tooling (ansible and bash scripts, mainly) to copy those into place. Those get backed up, and rebuilding systems is trivial, so I’m happy with that.
How often do you back up?
Daily + occasional manual snapshots when I tinker with things.
Where do you back up to?
Workstations and mobile devices backup to NAS. NAS gets pushed to a remote dedicated server monthly.
How often do you test your backups?
I currently use Deja Dup on my workstations and laptop, and that does restore tests monthly. I blow away the OS and reinstall regularly because I like playing with stuff on real hardware. That’s the real restore test, and I do that about every two months, at the current rate.
I’m not happy with Deja Dup’s performance, but it works, and I’m lazy. I’ll replace it Eventually™.
While, “Raid is not a backup” I feel like it does have a place in the polls.
I’d count it if it’s software RAID with snapshotting. The key difference between “backup” and “RAID” in my mind is that it also protects against accidential deletion.
Straightup RAID doesn’t give you that, but RAID + snapshotting does. So I’d personally count something like btrfs or ZFS based RAID as being a valid “backup”.
I regularly backup program configs, settings and/or custom stuff i’ve done for them, from major things down to really minimal, such as say exporting my Ublock custom filters list.
I rarely backup my actual… “data”, maybe once a month, usually more. Am not going crazy about “insert catastrophe here” or “of all the people in the planet, i was the one chosen for the ultimate hack job”.
May sound weird, but think about it; you always tweak and change and improve. If you’re lazy and don’t save it all down someplace, next setup you probably won’t even remember what it was you’d done. This way, i know i can format/re-install anytime, even right now, on any PC, and be exactly where i’m now on this one.
And i never test my backups, lol… /lazy
(i didn’t see any relevant option for weirdos such as moi, hence my explaining, lol)
I sync important files across 3 devices (3 separate geographic locations) whenever changes are detected. Previous versions of the files are kept indefinitely on 1 of the 3 devices.
People argue over whether a sync is a true “backup”, but for my purposes it works well
I back up via the ‘cloud’ and occasionally backup some stuff to an external drive as well.
What I don’t do but have been thinking about how best to do it is to back up my paper documents. Something I wonder if many people do at all, but I have severa paper only documents that I should be keeping safe.
I voted “No” on Backup. Though that’s probably not entirely true, it’s not a real backup that i do.
All Data that is important and can’t be replicated (My own Music, certain Documents, etc.) lives on my NAS. My OS Installations generally have a half life of below 6 months. So there’s nothing on my PC that’s actually important or can’t be replaced.
So to that end, i don’t backup specifically, i just seperate important data from my PC. I should probably make a second copy of that, but oh well…
I use Windows.
I do backup my \Users and \Backup folders monthly to an external hard disk. After it fills up I buy a new one and continue to write to the new drive.
I’m using the WD utility for convenience. New backups do not erase files from the external drive even if I remove them from my machine.
Additionally I backup my fiance’s /Users folder whenever I see fit. No fixed schedule here.
The drives sit in a drawer. I do not have off-site backups. No cloud either.
The files are mostly office documents and family pictures. Also some animated movies and games that I want to preserve for the future generation.
Keep all of my important documents on my NAS, and have that backed up to Google Drive (which is a bit annoying, because I have to use my Windows PC as a middleman to sync them to Drive, thanks to Google not having a first party sync application for Ubuntu).
All of my media will go up in flames with the NAS. Not worth me paying to back that up. Would be nice to have an off-site backup machine in a friend/relative’s house.
i back up /home , /etc and a local storage drive which has all my media on it.
i use a rsync script so files are just copied over, when done the nas is shut down.
additionally smb access is disabled.
At home, I just stick to an external drive for things that cannot be replaced. I keep an additional backup of my encrypted password database, because man, if I lose that,shit goes bad quick.
At work, I’m super anal about backups, snapshots, and a nightly offsite backup as a start. And after a few incidents, nobody argues with me anymore. It’s kinda like when you borrow someone else’s tools - it’s easy mentally to take better care of other people’s shit.
I’ll replace it Eventually™.
