Automatic backup solution advice

[betajaen]

Hey chaps,

So one of my harddrives is about to go off the deep end, the SMART status of it doesn't look good, and any tests on it return a fail.

Anyway, so I've bought two new 500GB hard drives, and I want to have my stuff mirrored/copied on the other drive. I don't want to do RAID because it's Motherboard dependent and I've had bad experiences with that in the past, and drive mirroring under Windows 7 (which sounds ideal), requires Business or Ultimate.

So a software solution is required. Open Source is preferred, I was thinking about using some ported Linux utility such as rsync. I only want my stuff backed up, there is no point for Windows or the programs to be copied too, so software that copies drives bit-by-bit aren't needed.

So, what do you guys use?

[kulik]

There are some fancy GUI tools for what you want but I don't really trust them. Personally I use RAID1 on my workstation with rsynced weekly backups using my own little messy scripts I basically rsync from home desktop (both Linux and Win7) to my home server (which runs Debian). I tried more frequent backups but it's a hassle and IMO the sweet spot between too much hassle and too difficult recovery from data loss is a week.

And btw: If you have Intel motherboard, chances are you have Intel Matrix RAID. This is open fakeraid and mdadm has support for it in version 3.0 so your data should be safe even if Intel decides to not make motherboards with Intel Matrix RAID anymore (and the best thing about it is support in Win7 Home Premium pretty much the only reason keeping me from straight soft raid).

PS: RAID has completely different usage for me than backups. RAID keeps me going even when hard drive fails, whilst backups pretty much keep me from screwing up my own data accidentaly.

[betajaen]

It's an ASUS 5PQ, it has inbuilt RAID. I've always used ASUS motherboards, and had RAID striping on one years ago. It turned out quite well, and was pretty fast, although the hard drives were very noisy.

Anyway, I have Github for all my code. I've gotten into the habit of committing quite regularly now, and I use DropBox for other things; like backups for course work. As for the harddrives; I'm not going to mirror them now, I think I'll just have one 500 gb "C:/" partition and two partitions on the other drive for My Profile folder, and Development.

Having a massive C:/ partition is going to be a bit weird, many probably know this but from Amiga background it was typical to have as many partitions as humanly possible, I carried over this ideology to the PC and it isn't common for my computer to have seven partitions or more. Having three is going to be strange.

[kulik]

Yeah I used to have some insane multiple partitions, it makes a lot of sense on Linux but much less on Windows where you can't tune FS as much. I have multiple partitions on my Linux but just one single big one on Win7.

Sadly the fakeraid is chipset dependent, so even if you only used ASUS, your RAID could stop working in the future. AFAIK the safe fakeraids are Intel Matrix Storage and Intel Rapid Storage (their implementation is 100% the same, just the name differs). As I said, the RAID keeps me going even when one HDD fails so I don't have to reinstall, recover data, etc... This is usually 2+ days of setback before you get a new HDD and install everything.

I had some PITA HDD fails and since then I mirror everything, disks are cheap, my nerves are not And stripping IMO is just insane, I would only do it on my fun PC or something (which I don't have ), never on a production box. The mean hdd fail time gets halved by this step!

[Mikachu]

I use FreeFileSync to synchronise and backup my important files (photos, documents...) between my main computer and laptop.
It can either synchronise manually or automatically, and can handle sync conflicts.
I find it rather useful for my basic use, don't know if it can fit your needs...

[betajaen]

Well I've installed the two drives. Had a little trouble putting them in, I needed take out the hard-drive cage, but the graphics card was in the way. I have a really big tower, but an even bigger graphics card. In the end I managed to squeeze them in over the graphics card in odd angles.

I partitioned them and Windows 7 is installed, so is Visual Studio. Just installing my other applications, and it's ready to go. I've decided not to install Adobe Flash this time, instead I'm going to use it "sandboxed" in VirtualBox with Ubuntu, so I can watch iPlayer, 4OD and Youtube.

I think I'll get a portable USB based harddrive and back up anything big onto that. Dropbox and Github are really what I wanted for backup, everything else on my computer is software, which comes on CD or can be downloaded from the internet.