Backup strategies

I have long ago moved all my personal documents to OneDrive and my views on back-ups have changed. What do others do for backups of their computers? Rebuilding one is much easier than it used to be and reconnecting to onedrive makes my files available. Are Backups a thing of the past?

Conversation 12 comments

  • ErichK

    Premium Member
    20 March, 2018 - 11:04 am

    <p>I have a lot of, but not all, of my documents in Dropbox. On my Windows PC I let File History do its thing using an external hard drive, and then I do another manual backup once a month to another external hard drive that I keep away from the PC. On my Mac mini and Linux box, I backup manually as needed to external media.</p>

  • lvthunder

    Premium Member
    20 March, 2018 - 11:05 am

    <p>Of course not. You have just outsourced your backups. Now Microsoft has to do them instead of you. I would still have a backup in case something happened to your One Drive account.</p><p><br></p><p>Also it depends on how much data you have. I'm a photographer and have around 8TB of photos and growing. So One Drive or Dropbox doesn't work for me. I do have them all backed up to Backblaze though. It took over a month to upload initially. I think when I started I only had 3 or 4TB though.</p><p><br></p><p>My friend who is also a photographer has a Synology NAS with like 20-30TB of storage. He has them on the NAS and an external hard drive. The NAS has RAID so he can lose one drive and not lose any data. The online storage won't work for him at all.</p>

  • Jamiemcg

    20 March, 2018 - 1:43 pm

    <p>I use several different services to backup my files, but generally I use iCloud to backup my phone (including photos that I've taken with it), OneDrive for photos, Google Drive for documents, and DropBox for miscellaneous files (some videos, images, screenshots, code, etc.). </p><p><br></p><p>I've also been thinking of purchasing a NAS so that I can have a local copy of my backups just in case something were to happen to my files on the cloud.</p>

  • Minke

    20 March, 2018 - 6:16 pm

    <p>I currently have all my recent docs and spreadsheets on Google Drive, backed up to OneDrive via CloudHQ (free). I keep a local stash of all my photos at full resolution and lots of music, and some old stuff that isn't critical but stored "just in case." All photos are automatically backed up to Google Photos (free) at their normal "high quality," which is unlimited storage. I have compared images stored at this quality level with original jpgs from the camera and I can't detect any difference even at extremely high resolutions. Their compression algorithm is pretty slick. The local stuff (full-res photos and music mostly) is rarely accessed or changed, so I back it up once every three months or so to a couple of portable hard drives. If I lost all of this stuff I probably wouldn't notice, so not that important. My goal is to move everything into the cloud and eventually not rely on any local backup.</p>

  • wright_is

    Premium Member
    21 March, 2018 - 1:22 am

    <p>My data is stored primarily on OneDrive (some personal data is stored locally). This is then rsynced to a second drive on my desktop, from where it is the encrypted and stored on Carbonite Online Backup and copied off to a NAS (or was, the NAS died a few weeks ago and needs to be replaced). It was also synced to an external disk drive that was disconnected between weekly backups.</p><p>Crypto trojans can still encrypt your data and anything that isn't on OneDrive will still be affected, likewise, OneDrive only does versioning of certain file types (it used to just be Office documents, but I believe that some other formats are now also versioned, but large databases, videos etc. probably won't be, because it takes up too much space for it to be economical for Microsoft (or other cloud providers) to do), which means any non-versioned files will still be lost in such an attack.</p>

    • arunphilip

      21 March, 2018 - 3:24 am

      <blockquote><a href="#255015"><em>In reply to wright_is:</em></a></blockquote><p><br></p><p><em style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent;">Crypto trojans can still encrypt your data</em></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent;">Have you tried out '</span><em style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent;">Controlled folder access</em><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent;">' in Windows 10 to protect against ransomware? It allows you to define a list of folders to protect, and you specify a whitelist of apps that can modify those folders. This feature is pretty nifty, but has a little more room for improvement (e.g. provide specific apps access to only a subset of the protected folders, not all protected folders). </span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent;">Check out Microsoft's overview here: cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/10/23/stopping-ransomware-where-it-counts-protecting-your-data-with-controlled-folder-access/</span></p>

      • wright_is

        Premium Member
        21 March, 2018 - 9:55 am

        <blockquote><a href="#255034"><em>In reply to arunphilip:</em></a></blockquote><p>I have, but I have enough software that needs manually added exceptions, that it is a real pain to use.</p>

        • arunphilip

          21 March, 2018 - 12:31 pm

          <blockquote><a href="#255075"><em>In reply to wright_is:</em></a></blockquote><p><br></p><p>I agree, the UI for it is quite poor. I hope Microsoft see enough value in it to improve the UI and features. </p>

  • Bats

    21 March, 2018 - 1:39 am

    <p>I use OneDrive as my total backup solution as I have it synced with My Documents in Windows 10. So whatever file I create, it automatically syncs with OneDrive. My secondary backup is Zoolz. At a designated time, the Zoolz tool backups my files in cold storage. However my primary "Go To" drive is Google Drive. It just makes the most sense to use Google Drive being that Gmail, Docs, Photos…anything works well with it.</p>

  • arunphilip

    21 March, 2018 - 3:19 am

    <p>I use OneDrive for my documents, photos, music and licensed software (i.e. the setups). </p><p><br></p><p>I have an external HDD that I sync to using SyncToy 1-2 times a week, which includes all this OneDrive content + my movie rips. This gives me a local copy to restore from (rather than downloading gigabytes of data from OneDrive). </p><p><br></p><p>I use Windows 10's '<em>Controlled folder access</em>' to safeguard all these folders against ransomware attacks. It took a bit of periodic tweaking to get right, but now works transparently. </p><p><br></p><p>I used to have a NAS, but stopped using it since I didn't like keeping it always running, and keeping it offline meant waiting for it to boot up for those times I did want a backup. I don't do metal backups (i.e. full backups of the OS) either, so if that gets hosed I'd just buy a new SSD/HDD and start from afresh there. </p>

  • wunderbar

    Premium Member
    21 March, 2018 - 12:40 pm

    <p>Onedrive is not a backup. It is a sync service, they are different.</p><p><br></p><p>I do use onedrive as one part of a solution but I also back up to backblaze as I also have more than 1TB of photos. the backblaze backup also protects against accidental deletion, which onedrive doesn't do nearly as well.</p><p><br></p>

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