The Synology has netatalk configured out of the box so it can be seen in the network as an AFP share and can be used as a destination for TimeMachine backups (I'm not using it in that way but a couple of friends who use Macs told me it works well).

It also has a package to backup data stored on the Synology to Amazon Glacier, and that is something I'm going to enable soon in order to improve redundancy (and to have an off-site copy of my data).

On top of that some of that stuff is also spread between Dropbox, Drive, Github and thumb drives. I might have like three to five copies of each file at any given time.

- [1]: http://www.synology.com/products/product.php?product_name=DS...

- [2]: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=810

- [3]: http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

Just solid NAS products.

Upgraded recently to the DS213 and the WD RED 3TB disks in RAID-1. Running all sorts of services from SMB, AFP, UPNP, Surveillance, Backups, Etc. Performs flawlessly. Incredibly fast, DSM is an elegant UI (and powerful) and just couldn't be happier for all my wireless/wired client.

I backup the Synology once a month to a standalone 3TB disk via eSATA for even more redundancy.

My previous setup was two large USB drives, and doing everything manually (when I remembered and/or could be bothered to), but I almost lost data this way.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004IYJX20/ref=oh_details_o...

  # rotate daily backups
  ssh -i $SSHKEY -q $BACKUPHOST rm -rf $BASEDIR/home.3
  ssh -i $SSHKEY -q $BACKUPHOST mv $BASEDIR/home.2 $BASEDIR/home.3
  ssh -i $SSHKEY -q $BACKUPHOST mv $BASEDIR/home.1 $BASEDIR/home.2
  ssh -i $SSHKEY -q $BACKUPHOST \
  "(cd $BASEDIR/home.0 && find . -print | cpio -dplm $BASEDIR/home.1)"

  # backup
  TMPFILE=`mktemp /tmp/excludeXXXXXXXX`
  cat << EOF > $TMPFILE
  quota.user
  .cache
  EOF

  rsync -Lazv -e "ssh -i $SSHKEY" --update --delete \
  --exclude-from=$TMPFILE $HOME $BACKUPHOST:$BASEDIR/home.0

  rm $TMPFILE

I buy a pair of devices (e.g. Tonidos) with attached commodity HDDs that I split with a friend. He plugs his into his network, I plug mine in.

I dump files to my local device, but they actually get buffered and then stored overnight at his place, and vice-versa. It's a remote backup storage device, not a NAS. Not for fast file serving.

If my house burns down, he hands me the HDDs and I decrypt them with my password.

If his IP changes, his device re-registers with mine somehow. Cleverness needed here, not a $10 month subscription. E.g. his IP is emailed to me, or my device, or something like that. Someone knows how to make two devices find each other over the net, I am sure.

Edit: Of course, it would be nice if it still worked if he was tech-illiterate, e.g. you could give the other one to your elderly parent or neighbor or whatever.

Back up should be a multitiered thing so you don't mind if one goes kaput. That way you can use a 3rd party without 'depending' on them.

Takes the distributed backup idea to the n-th degree.

I'd like to buy something that I own and store where I want.

# Principles

Back up everything. Preferably to the cloud and to a local disk. Automatically.

You should test restores, but you probably wont. Have two independent backup methods for every piece of data.

You should be able to be up and running to last day's backup within an hour or so.

# Personal

CrashPlan: I want to backup every version of every file on my local computer to a local disk and cloud storage.

SuperDuper: I also want to have bootable nightly images of my machine in case I need to restore immediately.

CloudPull: I want to have a local copy of any Google file I have (Docs, Gmail, Calendar)

IFTTT to DropBox: And whenever possible, I want to have a copy of any other cloud-based service (e.g., Instagram)

# Servers

Linode Backup: Turnkey and presumably the Linode folks are smarter than I am.

Duplicity to S3: In case Linode folks aren't that smart, I will have nightly backups of everything.

I have 2 USB drives. Every month or so I put my code on a USB drive and take it to my mom's house when I do laundry. I leave the latest backup there, and take the other drive home.

Cloud providers hate me.

Never rely on hard disk. They will break. Don't rely on home solutions, you'll lose everything in case of fire, flood, lightning strikes, robbery, ...

Any home base solution has a single point of failure, it's location. So any solution with offsite backup will be better.

My suggestions :

- Buy a 2 disks NAS (Synology, Qnap, Lacie or similar), you can have 8TB on some of them. Want extra safety? Go with a 4 bay NAS in RAID10.

- Get a Crashplan yearly plan.

- Subscribe to unlimited bandwidth with your internet provider.

Any other online file sharing service will do the job but Crashplan is built for that and the price is fair.

And whatever solution you choose, the most important thing is, TEST IT. Do a simple recovery test once in a while. Setup alerts or reminder to look at your backup.

That is not a backup, that's an external storage. A backup should only be accessed to sync data (preferably with versioning, so the old data is not overwritten) and to recover lost data.

My computers are synchronized with a home server that has mirrored disks, then the home server is backed up to cloud and to my parent's desktop (off-site backup). The backed up data has ~2TB (mainly photos, private git repository, documents).

I use CrashPlan for the cloud and off-site synchronization. With a free account you can backup data to another computer (yours or a friend's). With a paid account you can backup to their cloud storage and you can get more things to tweak. You can provide your own encryption keys, so the data should be safer (as long as you don't loose the private key). The best thing is that it offers file versioning (even with a free account, but you don't get some of the advanced settings for that), so if something really bad happens - like a ransomware virus, that encrypts your files - you can still recover the older version. The only issue is that the application needs Internet access even when using it locally - so if something happens to your account, or you don't have Internet access, you cannot easily[1] access your data.

[1] http://crashplan.probackup.nl/remote-backup/support/q/how-to...

If price is an issue, and you don't care about security, I would also consider a private Flickr account for photos and iTunes Match for music, and then use Dropbox/Arq for the documents/other valuables. Photos/music are fairly safe offsite with those, then your docs will be in S3/Glacier with Arq. Not perfect, but an alright solution for cheap.

I have also written https://github.com/oxplot/cloudnbd for offsite backup. It presents any cloud storage (via pluggable backends) as linux block device which you can format to FS of your choosing. You can then mount it, RAID it, etc. and do crazy stuff with it. I don't use it yet because it's not well polished (and I'm lazy) but that's my ultimate weapon. It encrypts everything on the client side too so that should make NSA's job a tad harder.

I've got terabytes of data and it works great. The only thing I want is a third, off-site, non-cloud backup. I don't have a solution for that, but having my data in 3 places, one of which is the cloud, is good enough for me for now.

MBA and the data part of the USB drive backed up with Crashplan ($5/month)

Also have some stuff on Dropbox (free account) also backed up to Crashplan - it's mostly just stuff I need in other places.

All my documents on Google Drive, don't back that up because I don't think you can (the desktop client doesn't give access to actual documents). Additionally most of best pictures are either on Flickr or Facebook.

New back up method: 1. Back up everything with Deja Dup to $25/year, 50GB VPS daily - I don't have a lot of data. 2. Back up everything with Deja Dup to external drive monthly (maybe going to weekly).

Edit: All photos are resized monthly with a script to create a ~100KB copy that lives on my laptop and phone. I can see all photos I've ever taken on my phone, but still have the full-res copy backed up.

1. Google Drive (got 2 years of 100GB space with Chromebook), was previously using Dropbox

This provides me a backup locally on the computer and one off site.

2. I have an external hard drive connected to the workstation that runs an update weekly to give me a third copy of all my data. I switch out the drive with a second external drive on a weekly basis.

If my computer dies, I have Google Drive and then the external hard drive x2. If the external hard drive fails then no big deal. If Google drive wipes out everything still no big deal.

I backup around 70GB.

*edit: The OSes I use are Windows 8.1, ChromeOS, and OSX,

On my servers, every virtual machine is on an encrypted block device, so the data is already encrypted when it's written to the disk. Then I use Shasplit [1] and Rsync for efficient incremental backups. Restoration is a simple "cat" invocation (or use Shasplit for that), and I get back a full, running, encrypted VM with everything.

[1] http://vog.github.io/shasplit/

Oh and a VS320 DLT which gets done when I can be arsed as that has a two decade shelf life. It and the drive live in a 400kg fire safe.

And I print all my photos on 10x8 paper that are worth keeping.

And I have CDs for music still.

Edit: see a lot of people relying on just cloud services. Don't do that. Shit does go missing and fail. And I bet you don't test your multi-gigabyte cloud drop until you need to restore it which is bad juju.

One mistake I made with Dropbox is installing it on one of my linux servers, on my server I moved Dropbox folder, and it made Dropbox believe that I have deleted everything on my server. So it deleted most of my files, and recovering it was a mess. Even talking after talking with Dropbox support, I couldn't recover everything :(.

Looking for a better solution, but I need the cloud as I want to be able to access some of the files from my phone.

2. Both are backed up to Time Machine to a network drive, and also with Arq to Glacier.

3. I keep important documents in Dropbox.

This gives me "Oh shit, I deleted a file" protection from Time Machine and Dropbox, two local copies of all media and data in case of hardware failure or machine loss, and a last-ditch offsite Glacier backup.

Works well, and Arq isn't that pricey if using only Glacier.

http://www.backblaze.com/

easy to restore, and works silently in the background.

Simple and "just works" makes some customers happy, but Backblaze isn't perfect for everybody. If you like playing with your backups, scripting them, configuring machines, excluding folders - Backblaze will drive you crazy as you fight to control it. For example, if you add a new folder of images to your computer, Backblaze will push them to our datacenter unless you EXPLICITLY exclude that folder. Some customers would like an option that all new folders ARE NOT backed up until they "add" them to the backup. Backblaze must be thought of as a complete solution - if it doesn't fit your needs, we can highly recommend other more scriptable products to you.

There is no shame that we only fit the needs of a subset of customers, our biggest challenge is communicating what we do and do not do clearly so we don't waste your time.

The original question was "with these flaws why use Backblaze?" The answer is, only customers who view these "flaws" as good things should use Backblaze. For example, your files are encrypted at Backblaze and we absolutely don't store your password. But by default, you can "recover" your password with access to your email address. You can enable a higher level of security on Backblaze where you can NEVER recover your password and if you forget your password, you are screwed. This is NOT the best option if your Mom is using Backblaze to backup her cat pictures. Friendly and easy is a BETTER solution for some people. But if you are really, really concerned about security, look into Backblaze's "private encryption key" option.

http://rajiv.sg/blog/2012/11/19/configuring-os-x-mountain-li...

Never made it on HackerNews, but many people have found it useful.

For servers with data, which currently is just postgres - Heroku pg backups. We download, verify and archive them on S3 and to local server.

Are you talking about the Apple Time Machine app here? I'd be curious to hear about your setup if so. Right now I'm using time machine to a USB attached HDD, because my last foray into network attached volumes + time machine (using linux/samba as the volume host) was pretty painful.

I also like the idea of ZFS and periodic array scrubbing to detect invisible failures, which most RAIDesque configurations ignore.

Everything nowadays is easy enough to re-download from the internet at a later date.

I backup this drive and keep a copy at my parent's house in their safe.

I don't store anything online unless it is something mundane, like my dotfiles.

Shame it's not open source as there have been a few things I'd like to tweak (like quieten down the UDP noise a bit), but it's a pretty good backup solution IMO.

[1] http://www.bittorrent.com/sync