Backup

Great news! As the new top moderator I've reopened r/Backup.

​

We're back!

No approval is required, but please follow the rules. Add a Flair at the bottom of your post. That's helpful!

It is very unfortunate that this subreddit was shut down for two years. But now we're back!

wells68 - r/Backup top moderator

I have an unRaid server set up to use borg to backup data to an internal 3.5 HDD that is hot swap removable from the server(R710). It's 2TBs but it's getting full. I keep another duplicate drive offsite and rotate them.

I like WD. Looks like there's an issue with SMR drives vs CMR. I don't mind if there is a speed issue. Latency probably won't be a problem since this backup drive is not part of the array. The backup runs overnight anyway. I'm more concerned with longevity and reliability.

Should I stick with WD Red drives? Regular or Plus or Pro? Or should I using something else in their line? Is Blue enough for this use case?

Also, do folks buy 2 identical drives at the same time or space them out by, say, a few months, just to try to get drives that have different manufacturing dates / from different batches?

​

Hey guys, with the idea to get rid of having my privates files and pictures on “public” clouds like OneDrive e.g. I bought a Synology DS224+.

My strategy was:

1. sync my files from PC to NAS with Synology Drive
2. sync my pictures from iCloud to my PC and sync my pictures to the Synology NAS

That way I keep my files still local on my hard drive (for quick access and editing).

To protect myself from ransomware, I additionally use Ashampoo Backup to create backups from several folders, mainly containing my files but not the pictures and store them on the NAS using a dedicated user account. However, once Ashampoo Backup connects to the NAS to create a backup, the software use the credentials of the backup account. From this moment it seems I can access the backup storage on the NAS via SMB.

My understanding is, that a ransomware would be theoretically able to access the NAS that way as well and could encrypt my backups.

So, what can I do to improve my backup strategy?

Thanks.

I am out of storage on my PC and have most of my large games on my USB. I'm very nervous that it could become damaged or cease to work, I'm wondering what my options are for backing up the files without taking up any pc storage. Thank you!

Hi all!

As the title says, I'm looking for software/solution that would fit my use case as a creative professional.

My needs:

• Syncing files from smaller (portable) drives to a larger external (home) drive
• Automatically detecting new files on the smaller drives and backing them up to the big drive
• Backing up the big drive to a cloud service

Here's what I currently have at my disposal:

• (2) Sandisk Extreme, External SSD, 1 TB
• (1) Western Digital MyPassport, External HDD, 2 TB
• (1) Samsung T7, External SSD, 1 TB
• (1) Western Digital External Desktop Backup Drive, HDD, 12 TB!
• Macbook Pro, 14", 2021, M1 Pro chip, 512 GB SSD
• 2 TB paid iCloud plan
• 30 GB paid Google Drive plan (linked to my Squarespace business account)

I bought that BIG external drive with dreams of being able to set up some kind of automatic backup system, but it hasn't happened yet, and I need a hand.

In a dream world:

• The HDD 12 TB functions as the "master" storage
• I can pull files off of the 12 TB, and move them to the smaller SSDs and HDDs as needed for trips and projects
• I can work from the smaller drives, loading them up with project-specific files — take them to a coffee shop with my laptop, edit a video, and so on
• I can also take the smaller drives on trips, fill them up with new media (photos, videos, audio) and when I return from a trip, just plug in the storage drive to the computer at the same time as the big drive, and have it auto-update
  • I suppose an alternative would be a system that backed EVERYTHING up to a cloud service... but I am worried about version management and messing up files that are being worked on while currently in Davinci/Ableton/Lightroom/etc.

Is there a system like that in existence? Am I just dreaming here?

I'm so sorry for all the info and the complexity. But I'm years into being a data schmuck and I need help! Thanks so much.

Hello Everyone,
I'm new to the backup sub-reddit.

I'm here after I had an weird incident on windows where all my precious photos and videos got deleted and I couldn't recover them.

Now here's my plan. I don't want to use google's services.

I will host my own NextCloud instance on my home network which will backup daily. From my Phones, and other Computers. I don't need much storage 2 Tib as of now will be 4 times what I require.

Assuming a 50 watt constant power usage it will cost me around 3.5$/mo (in my country), but I know the backups will only run at night and during the whole day the NextCloud server will idle around 10 - 15 watts so It's nothing.

Now after receiving the backup I will encrypt all the files so that not even the names are visible and store them to Backblaze. (this might push the server to max for a while though 1GB of encryption daily won't hurt)

People say Backblaze will cost me around 9$/mo. But my backup size is <1Tib as of now so I might be able to minimize the cost as of now.

So In total I will have one local copy on all my local machines then I will have one copy on the local server and one archive in the cloud. I think this should be Ok for keeping my photos and videos safe at around ~12$/mo.

OR is there a better way that I can optimize this and reduce the cost. I'm a CS student and don't have any money yet. I've been keeping all the photos and video on a local SSD for all that time but it lead to a little friction and thus I lost a month of Photos and Videos (personal).

The friction being I became lazy and had the data on my working machine locally and and somehow this windows machine got the data deleted :'(

I am making a backup of one of my HDD's with pictures, videos and all sorts of data, is there a way to compare the two hdd's to see if they contain the same data, or if not, which one is missing?

Hey everyone, newbie here I have 6 HDs from a long time ago that I used to store Mac backups and photos I think in total the space is less than 2tb so I purchased a couple of drives from Seagate that are small to have all the drives move to one smaller drive

I’m in a Mac Mini and wonder what the best way to copy the contents of the 6 drives to the new seagate drive.

Just connect 2 drives and drag and drop? Thanks

Most backup and file explorers are designed to find very specific files.

What if someone feels nostalgic and wants to explore random documents, photos, and videos from the past, just like browsing through an old box found in the attic?

Is there any ‘fun’ backup or file exploring software available? I’m happy to pay for solid solutions.

Edit:

Think of it like “On This Day” from Apple Photos, or the TimeHop app. I’m looking for a super user-friendly way to browse old drives, built around enjoying some time in the past.

I'm looking to start doing external backup of our family photos (besides the cloud we're already doing) and am a little confused when seeing the price of external drives vs the hardware I would need to build my own.

If buying a finished external drive for backup, I can likely get 1-2 TB for around $90(in my currency), but an SSD drive itself would be at least $100 for 1 TB, if not closer to $150.

I'm thinking this is because the external drives are still doing harddrives and not SSD? Except I'm having trouble finding out if that's the case. Say, a Seagate Expansion 1 TB external drive, would that be a harddrive? Can't seem to find the info and I'm looking to get an external SSD.

I have a qnap ts453 which has just died after just 7 years which I'm a little disappointed about as it wasn't cheap. I currently have Apple products that I back up and also use iCloud and Time Machine. It's been a while since I looked into backup options and wondered if there are any different options to using a nas? To be honest I don't use some of the functions on my nas as it's just for storage.
In an ideal world I would like something that can be used for Time Machine and general backups but have a decent processor and good network speed, I don't really need hdmi and media options.

Cheers

Anyone got any thoughts on the best way to do this?

We have a couple of sites. For the last few years they have had a Windows server whcih amongst other things was the main file storage. At each site there was a Synology NAS drive. Each server ran Backup Assist which backed up to the NAS and to an external HDD which was rotated weekly.

We have now moved more towards the cloud. User data is stored directly in M365 through a combination of Exchange, OneDrive, Teams and Sharepoint.

We plan to retire the servers altogether and run a serverless environment.

To do this fully though we need a backup solution in place to backup M365. To meet our insurance requirements, we are supposed to have an immutable offline copy of the data.

My ideal scenario would be to have a Synology NAS which can run some backup software itself, and maintain a backup of the cloud data. Then also make an additonal immutable copy to an external drive (or another NAS) - If we can get away from the manual rotation of external drives then this would be even better.

Most of the solutions I see, seem to backup to the cloud, rather than backing up the cloud.

I've been in talks with a few companies over their cloud to cloud backup solutions, but they are rather expensive.

Anyone else run something that works well for this? Or do you have any recommendations? Thanks!

Hey Guys,

Hope you all are doing good, I just went through a data loss accident, and what should I say I deleted a month of photos and video because of my fault. I once deleted and lost all hope and then I managed to back it up from google photos trash, then once I took the data out from google photos I became lazy to back it up and now today when I went to check the data it's not there I'm using Windows.

Then I had this brilliant idea that my e-mail must have the takeout links but sadly they go stale after a week of archiving the data.

I like google photos but at the same time I have this privacy concern in my mind that what if somehow some one gets access to my e-mail then I'm done they'll be able to see all my photos I make sure to not click and extra personal picture but still there are some memories that I won't want to go public.

I've thought of using a separate account for just storing the photos purpose, since even if I login my google account to my PC's Chrome browser someone can easily access all my photos through there thus now I back-them up in a separate account which is not logged in anywhere except my phone.

Man thinking about a secure backup is hard I don't know why I can't trust google photos.

Please help me clear up my messy mind.

Thank you guys for reading this worthless post.

I want to copy files while preserving all attributes including creation and modification times?

When I copy on Mac, rsync -t, cp -p, ditto -V do not preserve creation times. The new file shows it was created at the time of copying.

Are there any other commands on Mac, Windows, or Linux that do preserve creation times?

I want it to scan a folder on my main PC, then scan a folder on my external hard drive and whatever one has, that the other doesn't, gets copied over. The files are a mix of pdf, audio, video etc. I prefer a manual option to automated as the external drive isn't always connected. There are so many software options I don't know what is good and what isn't. Also I don't want a free version that will keep nagging me to upgrade to the "pro" version. Suggestions please. Thanks for any help!

Hi there!

I've had several internal and external HDDs that I used to backup my photos and videos. However, almost all have died the last years. I just can't stand them anymore. For reference, I've bought two Seagate Barracuda Green 4TB, and I've sent them 3 times already to be replaced...

Therefore, I'm thinking of buying a SSD to backup my media, since I haven't had any problems with them (granted, I've only used them as main drives).

Is the Crucial X6 (119 € 2TB) a good choice? It's on sale right now, but I've read that the cache depletes after having had 250GB written. After that, it writes at 40MBps, if I'm not mistaken. It is also QLC, which might affect longevity.

Regarding the X9 (144€ 2TB), I can't find any review...

I have bought the X9 pro (174€ 2TB) for my work, and it's very good, but it might be overkill for backups.

What do you recommend? Any of these, some other?

Thanks!

The backup application shows the following log to this specific catalyst store

Discover Status ERROR = 0xA0009B23 (E_PVL_OST_CONNECT_FAILURE

however, I connected to a diffrent Catalyst store on the HP Storeonce  and it connected fine 

on Catalyst console the sotre showing fine on the Storeonce console however it says house keeping is pending and the time is stuck aganist this store and not progressing; I will try and remove the housekeeping block window as one of the steps 

The other catalyst stores on the same server are showing fine 

This seem to have occured after we aged some data 

Now we cant send any data to the catalyst store;  it is disabled and when we tried enabling it across diffrent servers /rebooted /tried readding to another server it shows Unable to conect to open storge device Ensure the network is properly configured.

Is there a command that I can run to check if the intigity of the catalyst store is intact? 

My mil has a computer that's about to die. We need to get the photos off of it FAST. What would be the easiest way? Get a hard drive and just copy everything? Any ideas? Thanks!

Afternoon!

I'm trying to improve the resilience of my project data. Does anyone know if Google Cloud can delete after X Time or has automation features?

My project folder is circa 50gb currently.

I have tasks that sync copies the data from my PC to a TrueNAS Server, then I have a task set up to copy that data to Google Cloud. Now that's two physical copies, 1 cloud copy, which I'm quite happy with.

But I'd like to go the extra step with more cloud back ups. I'd like to implement a Bi-Daily Back Up.

• Google Cloud Monday
• Google Cloud Wednesday
• Google Cloud Friday

But with that, I'd ideally like an automated task remove the data before it backs up on that day. Does anyone know if this is this possible with Google Drive (note I'm using a workspace account)?

So schedule would be like this:

Initial Run:

[Image]

Then going forward:

[Image]

Acronis Active Protection Service - Services and PowerShell

When AAP service is "running" it slows down every app start up time on Windows 11.
Disabled it and restarted PC (selective startup).
But when ATI starts a backup it restarts the AAP service again.
Ransomware protection is not enabled, so don't see why it is needed.
Appears to be no way to stop or kill the service as access is denied even to admin (see screenshot).
Have you had this problem? How did you overcome it?

Thanks in advance for your help.
I am trying out other backup solutions (R-Drive, Paragon), to move away from troublesome Acronis, but have not yet found one that is functional, fast, reliable and inexpensive.

I have two drives, one NVME (C) and one SATA 2.5 (D). I've moved my Pictures and Videos Windows folders onto the D-drive.

Everything I've found about using System Image (specifically EaseUS & AOMEI) speaks about using it to image only one drive. I'm pretty sure that I can take a system image of both C and D and save it to the same external drive in different folders.

If solely my C drive started to fail and I inserted in a new drive, booted to recovery, and clicked to restore, that would be alright because it would merely setup a copied Windows with an empty Pictures and Videos folder I can then redirect back to the D-drive folders, correct?

And if I got whammied with malware and swapped out both drives, I would boot to recovery, restore C, then again boot to recover, restore D, and once again redirect the Windows folders?

Hi all,
i've been using PolarBackup lifetime until they removed it..

I'm looking for another backup service, where the bare minimum is 3TB.
I'm constantly adding and moving files from the directories that are backed up, would appreciate if the service would update the storage accordingly.

It would be even cool to access single files that are uploaded.

I tried iDrive but it was permanently getting stuck at uploading single files and customer service was unhelfup.

I've seen online Sync, BackBlaze and DropBox but wanted to have a hint from you lads first.
I'm open to try anything

thanks in advance :)

I'm looking for some cheap solution to backup my photos and video I have around 1TB of them and increasing day by day. I have an SSD for localbackup and my phone has google photos which backs up my photos and vids till the 15g.b gets filled then I do a takeout through google photos and store them in the SSD. Also I fear what if I loose my SSD?

That's why I'm asking what would be a good cheap solution to backup my encrypted photos just to safe keep them to an offsite location aswell.

I've heard about BackBlaze, PCloud(expesnive for me), I know amazon S3 but don't know the pros and cons.

Thankyou.

My client keeps her data on a Dropbox account and an external drive attached to her Windows desktop. She often works remotely by connecting her MacBook to the desktop (rather than running applications on the Mac). Can someone recommend the best strategy: which should be the primary storage and which should be the backup? She's independent, doesn't work for a corporation, so there's no IT department running backups.