How do you backup your precious data?
Recenlty I've damaged my 1 TB hard disk so it's unusable now (I have yet to hand it to some data recovery lab to check if data can be recovered). Unfortunately I haven't made (almost) any backup.
I had some slightly bad experiences with backup software. I tried using Ubuntu Cloud for hosting my data, but soon I've discovered that when I update files many times repeatedly, the client starts having very long delays before uploading data. The data I've tried to keep on cloud was, among others, some my projects that I've actively worked on and frequently recompiled. I was also using some software that was supposed to keep a mirror on another disk. It wasn't working automatically AFAIR and I wanted it to be bidirectional - ie program should update the older copy automatically. Another problem was that I was getting some weird read errors from disk under some circumstances (eg enabling AHCI mode in BIOS resulted in read errors). In the end the program required too much overseeing and manual actions for my lazy nature.
A good backup software for me would be:
- automated and easy to use,
- able to add Reed-Solomon codes to backed up data,
- checksumming the data throroughly,
- able to keep old copies for files in selected folder,
- albe to ignore selected folders/ files/ particular filename/ path patterns,
- able to detect that I have moved some folders (eg by comparing checksums and file attributes),
- work for different types of media and services at once, eg disk-drives, pendrives, cloud storage, DVD-ROMs, etc
- work on Ubuntu, Windows 8, Android, etc
- is free or cheap,
Probably there's no such program and for different types of data people use different backup strategies.
Question is:
How do you backup you data? Do you use different strategies for different type of data (eg depending on frequency of changes)? Which programs and services do you use and how? What you find comfortable and uncomfortable about them?