How do you back up your personal data?

**administrator** · 2 May 2013, 08:56

Oh bugger, so sorry to hear about this - nothing worse than losing photos. Keep the disk though, you can send it off to get it recovered from the platters I think, might well cost a few hundred (or more!) but might be worth it for photos of your child. Did you try the freezer trick on it too? If not stick the disk in the freezer for a few hours and then try and recover again...

At home I have a desktop with a few TB drives in, these all back up using SyncToy to an attached USB3 drive. Once a year when I visit my mum or the in-laws I take a USB drive up to them with all my photos and home movies and leave a copy with them as well. So even if we have a break in or fire we will still have most of the pics. With my home now on FTTC I have an upload of 20MB so might think more about cloud solutions shortly but have 90GB of photos and about the same in home videos so would be a pig to upload to start with...

Here's a link to SyncToy:
Download SyncToy 2.1 from Official Microsoft Download Centre

**Cliphead** · 2 May 2013, 08:59

Three external drives to move around the various computers as well as a NAS which everything goes to (and in turn is backed up to three locations). All the PC's have more than one internal drive which I use for backups as well.

Overkill but not taking any chances with personal and company data.

Turn an old PC into a NAS

**eek** · 2 May 2013, 09:05

Originally posted by Cliphead View Post

Three external drives to move around the various computers as well as a NAS which everything goes to (and in turn is backed up to three locations). All the PC's have more than one internal drive which I use for backups as well.

Overkill but not taking any chances with personal and company data.

NAS in garage stores everything. Everything important is stored multiple times on different drives.

Anything personal is also copied to S3 and from there to Amazon glacier after a few months. Its the last chance salon so I'm happy paying the 12c a year it costs to store 1gb of photos.

**SimonMac** · 2 May 2013, 09:06

Originally posted by The Spartan View Post

Hi everyone

Absolutely devastated the external hard drive I had packed up and I lost photo's and other bits, the photo's being the most important thing on there as they're of the little one. I managed to recover 10% of them with TestDisk before the HD died completely a small consolation but at least I save some, what I want to know is how the masses securely and reliably back up there data in order to avoid such calamities? Normally I have them on one of the laptops too but I took them off when I wiped and forgot to put them back on

Photos are key to me so they are on a RAID'd NAS, but also me laptop too, I am a scuba diver and a philosophy when it comes to air redundancy is "One is none, two is one, three is enough", any more than that and it starts to be a drain on resource trying to keep everything in sync.

I use DropBox for documents etc, I know there are some privacy issues with cloud based storage but I am happy to take the risk rather than losing it

**The Spartan** · 2 May 2013, 09:21

Thanks everyone some really good advice there, I did the freezer trick and that's how I managed to recover some of the data. Does anyone know of a good data recovery company off-hand?

**VectraMan** · 2 May 2013, 10:05

I have an online backup with Carbonite, which works pretty well. Plus I have mirrored drives in my desktop, which are regularly backed up to a third internal drive (it used to be to a NAS, but I ripped the drive out and stuck it in the desktop).

Cloud ought to be the way, though obviously there are a few privacy/relying on third party issues. But at least I'm covered if my house burns down.

**d000hg** · 2 May 2013, 14:40

Everything important - documents and work - is cloud based as well as on at least one of my PCs. Paper documents are the bigger worry.

**b0redom** · 2 May 2013, 15:15

At the moment, everything is backed up to my RAID-6 (Free)NAS. I also do TimeMachine (as my primary workstation is an iMac).

I'm looking at the possibility of building another FreeNAS and leaving it up with the folks (after a full sync over local network) and then rsyncing over the Internet.

**stek** · 2 May 2013, 15:23

How do you back up your personal data?

I have a NAS - 6tb, a Sun Ultra 45 soon to be filled with 4 3tb disks, and offsite Crashplan unlimited storage, about 3tbs uploaded.

Yes - I lost the missus' pics from when she worked in Berlin....

How do you back up your personal data?