Where do you back up your data?

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Jonathunder. Modified by Opensource.com. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Nobody loves performing backups: they're often the last thing on your mind, an annoying task you think you can put off until tomorow. Even automated backups take some initial setup and cost. But to anyone who has ever suffered a catastrophic system failure or even just the slip of an errant delete key, proper backups are a lifesaver.

All physical media fail eventually. They only question is how long they last before they do. So if you care about the contents of a computer system, hopefully you've taken the time to set up a functional backup system. If you haven't, maybe this will be the last nagging reminder you need to get you to finally do it.

Whether you're setting up a simple rsync command that mirrors your home directory to a remote folder, or backing up hundreds of systems in a datacenter, you've got to store all of that data somewhere. So today we ask, where do you back up your data? On physical read only media, a spare hard drive, in the cloud, or somewhere else? Let us know where your spare bits are stored, and what influenced this decision.

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424 votes tallied
Magnetic tapes, CDs, or DVDs
4% (19 votes)
An external hard drive, locally (USB, NAS, etc.)
62% (263 votes)
A remote service, including the cloud
25% (106 votes)
Other (tell us in the comments)
2% (9 votes)
I live on the wild side: I don't keep backups
6% (27 votes)

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14 Comments

I use a cloud service and an external hard drive.

on my own OwnCloud

What about your owncloud backup..?

1. Working copy is on my laptop, desktop and phone
2. Working copy is syncronised to local server and kept in several versions
3. Server is backed up to external harddrive
4. Server is also backup up to external cloud solution

Not sure why we are not able to choose multiple options as that's what most IT pros do. We use a combination of disk-to-disk, backup appliance, and cloud.

I use a mix of local backups and the cloud.

I'm in the process of rolling out the ownCloud server to synchronize with everybody's computer in the house. It's on an old CPU with a new 2 TB hard drive.

Then I need to set a snapshot backup of the ownCloud data to another device in case we run across ransom ware.

The next step is to get the contents of the ownCloud server to backup to a remote location, but give it time...

1) Separate PC wakes every night and does a pull backup
2) highly encrypted push backup to cloud storage
3) highly encrypted push backup to 2 external HDDs once a month
1 using rsync, 2 using obnam, 3 using rdiff-backup

At home: back up to external and cloud drive. At Work: back up onto 1 sever that backs up to another server that has external drive and both servers get backed up to the cloud.

Cloud and external HD.

On an external disk

local external drive for the whole system plus cloud for my data/content.

Hybrid back up: a b c together

Most important stuff is copied on a NAS, and from there on 2 external drives and cloud provider.