Computer back up for home use
 

So if you guys haven't noticed from my other thread, my mom's pc crapped and still trying to recover a bunch of pics/docs of there. This made me think of home backups. We never back up our pc's at home. What do you guys use/do?

Do you guys use some sort of auto backup to dropbox/box/google drive etc?

Do you guys use some sort of network attached system?

What is better?

I'm all ears!

depending on how much data you need backup.

I have a lot of data I need backed up so cloud will not work for me.

I have a nas that I backup to weekly or monthly depending on how much changes I make
I also have an external hard drive I backup to as well monthly and hide it somewhere in the house just in case someone breaks in and takes my computer and nas.

You should get an external hard drive to begin with. Once you have complaints, then you can upgrade. The upgrade path will depend on what your complaints are.

for your parents, just use dropbox/google drive/sky drive or anyone of those cloud services. It's worth paying a few bucks a month to save the headache of having to recover data.

There's no way, ever, that they'll remember to hook up their external drive, or even want to copy files to a NAS. And a NAS will require (your) maintenance as well. It may not even be cheaper after buying the drives, replacement drives and NAS box/computer.

The only caveat to this would be if your parents store over 1TB of data(photos/videos)… then there are no cheap/easy solutions.

This won't help OP much I think but time machine is brilliant on a Mac. When I had a pc I used to backup my music, photos and documents to an external hard drive via copy and paste. Just make sure everything is filed in 3 folders so it's quick.

Also, it's more work but nice to store your hard drive away from your computer.

if you're building a new PC you could just run raid 1 -- that'd be the easiest for your parents to do. They have to do nothing different, all on the hardware level so no learning curve for them.

Downside is obviously you can't do a system restore or backup in case something goes wrong (like you would be able to with time machine / windows backups)

Acronis True Image if you want to clone the disk

EASEUS Data Recovery if your HD partition cannot be read or PC cannot detect the windows

or you just want to backup some files, just pull the HD and back it up with other PC or external HD enclosure

RAID is not backup. Its about the constant availability of data. An external drive or a NAS would probably be best. A lot of the NAS nowadays have built in backups that you can set and forget.

Personally for home use, unless the data is absolutely critical, RAID 1 is a waste of a drive.

Like everyone mentioned, purchase a cheap 2-bay NAS so everyone in the house (and not just your mom) can benefit. Then back the NAS up with an off-the-shelf portable hard drive big enough (or just create images and archive those). That's enough redundancy for 98% of the population. It's not automatic, but it's thorough.

Thanks for the suggestion guys. I'm thinking of using dropbox and scheduling automatic back ups on each pc. I really don't have time to babysit the back up process.

Ideally what I wanted was to drop maybe $50-$60 on a 100-200gb hd, have it connected to my router and setup some auto backup on each pc. But this seems not possible for my price range. I'm not willing to spend the $300-400 that is required for this.

couple years ago I bought a 1TB external hard drive that I back up my computer with every so often. Works perfect and it's easy to use and I have the info in my closet rather on someone else's server.

The important thing is to have a backup stored outside of your home and also that your backup DOES NOT stay permanently connected to the machine (either physically or over the network). A USB drive or redundant HDD's connected to your machine will only protect you from hardware failure, a virus or physical destruction of the property will still wipe out everything.

I recently had to deal with a virus that encrypts your PC's files of certain types and then goes for external of network drives and does the same, then demands you pay to get the decryption key. If your backup drive is always connected to your PC then any virus can get to your backups as well and destroy them. Since we had offline backups of the files I simply removed the virus and overwrote the files with the clean offline backups.

I'm not sure how dropbox, etc work but I would worry that a corrupted local file would overwrite the cloud copy and you'd still be screwed.