I use Amazon S3, with Jungle Disk as a front-end. Jungle Disk does incremental backups of large swaths of your hard drive to S3, keeping older versions of files for a user-specified number of days. I love it.

I never trust local backups, though I usually keep them on a USB drive, and make them using Vista's built-in (much-improved-over-XP) backup system.

Quote: Original post by riruilo
EDIT: Acronis believes 59 dollars are 59 euros, when actually 59 dollars are 44 euros.
Why do companies try to cheap Europeans all the time with currency conversion?

I've found an easy solution for that: never buy from such a company.

On a serious note though, you can get pretty decent backup for free. As always it depends on what you want, if you only want to back up some files (preferrably sources) then Subversion will do just fine. With junctions (Windows XP or Vista) you can even make backing up different loactions comfortable, too. Just point all directories that you want backed up to one particular location, and put that one under version control. This is what I'm doing (Subversion runs on a separate 300 euro Linux box on a RAID-1, additionally repos are backed up to an external disk once a week.).

If you want image backups (full disk) then you may want to look at something like system rescue cd. It maybe not as comfortable as Acronis, but it works entirely reliably. With a little thought, you should be able to automatize the backup process too, the system rescue cd allows customisations. If you do that, backup will boil down to "insert CD" or "plug in USB stick" and boot.

Quote: Original post by BeanDog
I never trust local backups, though I usually keep them on a USB drive, and make them using Vista's built-in (much-improved-over-XP) backup system.

I never trust online backups. They're out of my control, how could I trust them?

Quote: Original post by davepermen

Quote: Original post by BeanDog
I never trust local backups, though I usually keep them on a USB drive, and make them using Vista's built-in (much-improved-over-XP) backup system.

I never trust online backups. They're out of my control, how could I trust them?

Me neither.

Quote: Original post by davepermen

Quote: Original post by BeanDog
I never trust local backups, though I usually keep them on a USB drive, and make them using Vista's built-in (much-improved-over-XP) backup system.

I never trust online backups. They're out of my control, how could I trust them?

Are you talking about privacy or redundancy? Or both?

I use rsync for my desktop backups, rbackup for my server backups and GnuPG+scp for my encrypted offsite backups.

Quote: Original post by Gaiiden

Quote: Original post by davepermen

Quote: Original post by BeanDog
I never trust local backups, though I usually keep them on a USB drive, and make them using Vista's built-in (much-improved-over-XP) backup system.

I never trust online backups. They're out of my control, how could I trust them?

Are you talking about privacy or redundancy? Or both?

both, and availability.

i just give my data into foreign hands in a foreign country. what should i do if they don't fullfill their promise?

they can abuse my data, what can i do against it? (it could be some form of new malware page, malware-services).

they can accidentally f***up my data, and the sync-tool happily replicate it down onto my machine.

they can go bankrupt (not that this happens in the todays world haha)

they, or an isp inbetween can can make my access to my backup inaccessible when i need it the most. imagine a catastrophe happening (like an earthquake, possible down here in switzerland in my region). what if all my net-stuff is down and my house got killed. i completely lost all access then to my backups as well. may be work related stuff that i really would need while recovering to make money? no clue.

if i have my backups in my hands or hands of friends i can trust, they're much much much saver than when i give them some foreign company that promises to be good, and in the end only cares about making money. and may fail doing so (legally, at all, what ever).

as said, i have a windows home server, soon we have two at two district places where we sync data in between. maybe if my data gets really important i set up a third backup down in tessin (200km from here) where we have a holiday-appartement.

i'm actually building up a network of home-servers with a friend who has a club/bar etc. all his work data is saved on the home-server. he can backup out to me laters, too :) this all is a work in progress, of course.

Quote: Original post by davepermen

Quote: Original post by Gaiiden

Quote: Original post by davepermen

Quote: Original post by BeanDog
I never trust local backups, though I usually keep them on a USB drive, and make them using Vista's built-in (much-improved-over-XP) backup system.

I never trust online backups. They're out of my control, how could I trust them?

Are you talking about privacy or redundancy? Or both?

both, and availability.

i just give my data into foreign hands in a foreign country. what should i do if they don't fullfill their promise?

they can abuse my data, what can i do against it? (it could be some form of new malware page, malware-services).

they can accidentally f***up my data, and the sync-tool happily replicate it down onto my machine.

they can go bankrupt (not that this happens in the todays world haha)

they, or an isp inbetween can can make my access to my backup inaccessible when i need it the most. imagine a catastrophe happening (like an earthquake, possible down here in switzerland in my region). what if all my net-stuff is down and my house got killed. i completely lost all access then to my backups as well. may be work related stuff that i really would need while recovering to make money? no clue.

if i have my backups in my hands or hands of friends i can trust, they're much much much saver than when i give them some foreign company that promises to be good, and in the end only cares about making money. and may fail doing so (legally, at all, what ever).

as said, i have a windows home server, soon we have two at two district places where we sync data in between. maybe if my data gets really important i set up a third backup down in tessin (200km from here) where we have a holiday-appartement.

i'm actually building up a network of home-servers with a friend who has a club/bar etc. all his work data is saved on the home-server. he can backup out to me laters, too :) this all is a work in progress, of course.

I absolutly agree with you.

On the other hand, my idea is to have my backup system totally automated, using 2 external hard disks. I mean, for 1 month I use one hard disk, then I change it with the other external disk and I put the first one on a safe deposit box (in another building). After one month, do the same interchanging external hard disks.
And when I plug the hard disk (USB or eSATA), an incremental copy is done.

Can I do that with, for instance, with Acronis?
What software do you recommend for do this in a easy way and automated?
BTW, I use WinXP.

Thanks.

I use rsync (run regularly as cron job) to backup my whole work folder with everything to network share on my old PC. (I'm using SSHFS for share)

I also have extra scripts for backing up just the source code to flash drive which I keep with me, excluding all the generated files. When I'll get new website hosting, I may start backing up data there as additional safety measure. (well encrypted of course - I do not want to have to trust third party).
Crypto is much stronger than any safe deposit box btw. You can do encrypted backups to any shit host or to multiple shit hosts and it'll be more secure than in fort knox.

Quote: Original post by Dmytry
I use rsync (run regularly as cron job) to backup my whole work folder with everything to network share on my old PC. (I'm using SSHFS for share)

I also have extra scripts for backing up just the source code to flash drive which I keep with me, excluding all the generated files. When I'll get new website hosting, I may start backing up data there as additional safety measure. (well encrypted of course - I do not want to have to trust third party).
Crypto is much stronger than any safe deposit box btw. You can do encrypted backups to any shit host or to multiple shit hosts and it'll be more secure than in fort knox.

Hahaha.

Crypto is not useful if your home/office gets burned.