What’s your laptop/desktop backup recommendation for general public, not-highly-technical people who don’t have extreme security needs and just want not to lose their family photos etc?
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What’s your laptop/desktop backup recommendation for general public, not-highly-technical people who don’t have extreme security needs and just want not to lose their family photos etc?
Maybe it’s just “use the cloud drive,” but…OneDrive seems to cause a lot of problems? or does it?
@inthehands we've had success telling people to learn SyncThing but it does require significant prior experience
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What’s your laptop/desktop backup recommendation for general public, not-highly-technical people who don’t have extreme security needs and just want not to lose their family photos etc?
Maybe it’s just “use the cloud drive,” but…OneDrive seems to cause a lot of problems? or does it?
@inthehands I have been happily using Backblaze B2 as a backup destination from my Synology NAS for years now. I wouldn't recommend that for the target crowd you're asking about, but Backblaze does have a reasonably-priced home backup solution: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal
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What’s your laptop/desktop backup recommendation for general public, not-highly-technical people who don’t have extreme security needs and just want not to lose their family photos etc?
Maybe it’s just “use the cloud drive,” but…OneDrive seems to cause a lot of problems? or does it?
@inthehands if $50/year is within budget, and they’re not running a minimum spec machine, maybe backblaze.
Continuous, automatic backups. The time-machine style “show me this file / directory from an hour ago or a week ago” is very useful, maybe even more so than the complete system recovery.
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What’s your laptop/desktop backup recommendation for general public, not-highly-technical people who don’t have extreme security needs and just want not to lose their family photos etc?
Maybe it’s just “use the cloud drive,” but…OneDrive seems to cause a lot of problems? or does it?
@inthehands I still use Dropbox. Onedrive makes me nervous for some reason.
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What’s your laptop/desktop backup recommendation for general public, not-highly-technical people who don’t have extreme security needs and just want not to lose their family photos etc?
Maybe it’s just “use the cloud drive,” but…OneDrive seems to cause a lot of problems? or does it?
@inthehands Time Machine on two removable USB drives. One lives in your house and gets connected regularly; one lives somewhere else and you back up to that once or twice a year. All other answers are incorrect.
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What’s your laptop/desktop backup recommendation for general public, not-highly-technical people who don’t have extreme security needs and just want not to lose their family photos etc?
Maybe it’s just “use the cloud drive,” but…OneDrive seems to cause a lot of problems? or does it?
@inthehands System backups: CloneZilla.
Photos/etc: A compression format that supports adding a recovery record or (better still) an external recovery record such as PAR2 (which is open and pretty universal.) It's not ideal since it is commercial and not fully open, but RAR is a good option for the non-technical with a built in recovery record option. (And decompressing RAR files is open source, so it shouldn't be a problem extracting later even if things change. Probably.)
An external recovery is better because it won't rely on file headers or etc for the recovery, but I admit this may be more confusing. Then you can use something fully FLOSS like 7-Zip, so that's better, but it's a bit more technical. (Not as much so as it sounds though! Just compress, then add PAR after.)
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@inthehands System backups: CloneZilla.
Photos/etc: A compression format that supports adding a recovery record or (better still) an external recovery record such as PAR2 (which is open and pretty universal.) It's not ideal since it is commercial and not fully open, but RAR is a good option for the non-technical with a built in recovery record option. (And decompressing RAR files is open source, so it shouldn't be a problem extracting later even if things change. Probably.)
An external recovery is better because it won't rely on file headers or etc for the recovery, but I admit this may be more confusing. Then you can use something fully FLOSS like 7-Zip, so that's better, but it's a bit more technical. (Not as much so as it sounds though! Just compress, then add PAR after.)
@inthehands I think it goes without saying, but just to be clear, if security/privacy are even a consideration of any sort, "cloud" backups are not the way to go. But reliability is an issue too! You also can't rely on "cloud" backups since the services may change down the road or you may not be able to access them. For example, you can lose access to your account and then it's all just gone like that. I hope this goes without saying, but... just in case.
If you do use "cloud" backups, be very sure you encrypt. Even if it's seemingly completely unimportant stuff, you don't want to just let all of it go out there to any rando who gains access and you never know what could ultimately be used against you or abused.
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What’s your laptop/desktop backup recommendation for general public, not-highly-technical people who don’t have extreme security needs and just want not to lose their family photos etc?
Maybe it’s just “use the cloud drive,” but…OneDrive seems to cause a lot of problems? or does it?
@inthehands i really like borg backup. borgbase is a great and affordable hosted backup service. or backblaze is also good and similar.
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@inthehands Time Machine on two removable USB drives. One lives in your house and gets connected regularly; one lives somewhere else and you back up to that once or twice a year. All other answers are incorrect.
@jwz
Yeah, that’s my exact setup too (except the remote one is more like monthly). It feels like a lot for the tech-phobic who find even a password manager overwhelming, but maybe that’s just a hurdle worth finagling people over. -
@inthehands Time Machine on two removable USB drives. One lives in your house and gets connected regularly; one lives somewhere else and you back up to that once or twice a year. All other answers are incorrect.
@jwz @inthehands this is the way.
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@jwz
Yeah, that’s my exact setup too (except the remote one is more like monthly). It feels like a lot for the tech-phobic who find even a password manager overwhelming, but maybe that’s just a hurdle worth finagling people over.@inthehands @jwz May I ask where the remote one is? Parent's/friend's house? Safe deposit box?
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@jwz
Yeah, that’s my exact setup too (except the remote one is more like monthly). It feels like a lot for the tech-phobic who find even a password manager overwhelming, but maybe that’s just a hurdle worth finagling people over.@inthehands In my humble but correct opinion, they can either get over using external drives, or they can get over losing all of their photos. There's no third choice.
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@inthehands if $50/year is within budget, and they’re not running a minimum spec machine, maybe backblaze.
Continuous, automatic backups. The time-machine style “show me this file / directory from an hour ago or a week ago” is very useful, maybe even more so than the complete system recovery.
@lluad @inthehands just checked and it's $99 for backblaze. Looks good but at that price it's a maybe for me while at $50 I'd have just gone for it
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What’s your laptop/desktop backup recommendation for general public, not-highly-technical people who don’t have extreme security needs and just want not to lose their family photos etc?
Maybe it’s just “use the cloud drive,” but…OneDrive seems to cause a lot of problems? or does it?
@inthehands For most non-technical users on Windows or MacOS, definitely Backblaze. Set it and forget it, let it run in the background, restore 30 days' file history if needed.
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@lluad @inthehands just checked and it's $99 for backblaze. Looks good but at that price it's a maybe for me while at $50 I'd have just gone for it
@flexasync Huh, it’s gone up since I last paid attention.
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@inthehands @jwz May I ask where the remote one is? Parent's/friend's house? Safe deposit box?
@theorangetheme @inthehands Anywhere that is not likely to burn down at the same time is fine.
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@inthehands Time Machine on two removable USB drives. One lives in your house and gets connected regularly; one lives somewhere else and you back up to that once or twice a year. All other answers are incorrect.
@jwz @inthehands I use TM on *three* removable USB drives—two SSDs (one to carry outside the house in case of fires) and one spinning rust (for reliability). Also Dropbox for file sync to the spare machine, a hot spare which *also* has two SSDs for Time Machine, but isn't always freshly backed up (or touched) from one week to the next.
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@jwz @inthehands I use TM on *three* removable USB drives—two SSDs (one to carry outside the house in case of fires) and one spinning rust (for reliability). Also Dropbox for file sync to the spare machine, a hot spare which *also* has two SSDs for Time Machine, but isn't always freshly backed up (or touched) from one week to the next.
@cstross @jwz @inthehands is time machine apple only? Or can the plebs parttake in this techomagical marvel?
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@cstross @jwz @inthehands is time machine apple only? Or can the plebs parttake in this techomagical marvel?
@mavu @jwz @inthehands Apple Only. I believe there are third-party equivalents for other OSs.
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What’s your laptop/desktop backup recommendation for general public, not-highly-technical people who don’t have extreme security needs and just want not to lose their family photos etc?
Maybe it’s just “use the cloud drive,” but…OneDrive seems to cause a lot of problems? or does it?
@inthehands After years of messing around planning out how to build something myself, my father passed away and I got to be keeper of all photos.
Commercial home Synology NAS, backup of all photo and music, and Backblaze backup of the NAS itself. Which I did test.
Cost a few hundred in hardware, and about $100 a year for backup, if I recall correctly. That was surprisingly cheap.
And then it really just worked.
