Hi dudes! I'm going to buy an external hard disk for my backups (usb or eSATA, perhaps eSATA is better). So, I new a good program to create automatically my backups (I guess incremental backups are better to save space). What program do you use? (I don't care if I have to buy some programs, but please not expensive programs) Thanks a lot for your ideas. Ricardo.

I was recommended the free Cobian Backup program, and it satisfies my needs perfectly.

I even use the software as a quick and dirty way to back up my current project, until I actually setup a proper source-control system. [smile]

Gaiiden keeps recommending Mozy Home Backup to me, so I've been meaning to re-setup Mozy to backup my files online, in addition to backing it up to my external drive, but I've had a few inconviences with it (which were my fault), so I've delayed doing that. It's on my ToDo list though, and you should consider at least backing up your most important file with it.

For local backing up, I just use Windows Backup.

I use Carbonite. It's not free, but it's offsite, unlimited storage and I don't have to think about it. YMMV

For home where I have four machines, I use Disk-To-Disk (D2D) backup to a networked external 1TB hard drive. The windows machines use Windows Backup on the documents folders, the Linux box uses BackupPC on the /home/user tree. I thought about BackupPC on the windows boxes too, but ultimately decided against it.

At work we use Disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) on the servers, with redundant copies of the tape sent to multiple off site locations. I'm not sure what software is used.

I use a couple systems:

1) Windows Home Server. It automatically performs full backups of all the machines on my network. Computers wake up every night and take about 5 minutes to incrementally update the backup, and then they go back to sleep. Backup retention is configurable; I currently have something like 3 monthly backups, 3 weekly backups, and 3 daily backups. Also, all data stored on the server's shares are duplicated to another physical hard drive.

2) 40 GB of pictures uploaded to a Amazon S3 via JungleDisk. It's $6/month to store this much data.

3) 40 GB of pictures burned to numerous CDs and DVDs.

JungleDisk annoyingly does not perform filename normalization so now it wants to reupload all the pictures due to case changes. I'm considering writing my own S3 backup system to work around this.

And no, I don't have a fascination with backup. I'm just paranoid about losing data.

I use SyncBack Freeware for my local backups to an external laptop hardrive (awesome for portability, but don't forget to encrypt it!) and, as Servant of the Lord mentioned, I also pay $4.95/mo for Mozy to back up my files off-site.

Mozy is free for 2GB of storage so you can use it for specific, important files you definitely don't want to lose in a fire or flood or something like that. I'm not fond of losing anything so I fork over the dough. But you don't have to.

windows home server. 4.5tb on it. soon we'll have two. one at my place, one at my parents place. then we intersync the data on there.

For my Windows partition, I'm using Arconis TrueImage. I've got an image of Vista with all my programming tools and no drivers stored on a network share. After visiting a LAN party or when I feel my system is messed up, I simply insert the Acronis CD and TrueImage restores the entire partition in just a few minutes.

For my programming stuff, art, models and so on, I use Subversion. The repository is stored on a RAID-1 parition on a rented server (you can get them quite cheap these days). Daily repository backups are also uploaded to a local FTP server in the server provider's network, so unless the entire building of my server provider is levelled, my programming stuff is safe.

For other things that are not as important or just too large (like my music collection, which I could re-rip if it got lost or my MythBusters and Top Gear collections, which I could re-download if they got lost), I've got a 1 TB RAID-5 partition (consisting of 3x500 GB drives) on a server at home. As a nice side effect, even though it's just software RAID, I can pull data at 85 MB/s from the server. The backup software used in this case is Gentoo Linux =)

As far as I know, SCV (SVN...) are not designed as a backup systems.

I will try Arconis TrueImage, Carbonite and cobianbackup.

Thanks for help.

EDIT: Acronis believes 59 dollars are 59 euros, when actually 59 dollars are 44 euros.
Why do companies try to cheat Europeans all the time with currency conversion?

[Edited by - riruilo on April 10, 2009 6:04:26 AM]