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ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





This is a thread where we discuss backups. There are tools and services available for every operating system, for every need, at every price range.

Feel free to ask questions! It doesn't matter if you want to back up your phone pictures or your production database. It all needs a backup.

I may eventually include a list of recommended backup applications here, but there are so many that it'd probably be easier to just post your requirements and ask what fits your needs best.

Why do backups?
Everyone should have a backup in place because failure is inevitable. You will face the loss of data eventually. Maybe a hard drive fails, your building burns down, or your laptop takes a nose dive into a speculum bucket. Without a backup, you’re in trouble.

You should back up any unique data you have, as well as any data that would take too long to replace through some other method if the original data were to go missing. “Too long” is entirely subjective based on your needs.

This means your documents, pictures, and anything of the sort with user-generated content should be backed up. Your movies that took weeks to rip from disk should be backed up. Your business-critical Excel spreadsheet with its Access backend (oh god) should be backed up. Your email server should be backed up. And so on.

But you don't necessarily need to back up something you can download and install in 30 seconds, like Skype.
When in doubt, back it up.

Are there any good practices to follow?
Of course! Other than just having a backup in the first place, there are a few very basic considerations you should have.

First and foremost, If you have only one copy of something, it is not backed up. If you have a single point of failure, your data is not backed up. Your RAID array is still a single point of failure. A CD in a vault is still a single point of failure. Your stuff is not backed up unless at least two copies exist separately. RAID is not backup. RAID is not backup. RAID is not backup.

Beyond that, I feel there are three things every backup plan should consider:

Have an on-site and an off-site backup. Also known as a “hybrid” backup solution, this means you have a backup that is easily accessible and another that is not. This allows for speedy restores for anything short of disaster, and any restore at all if, say, your building burns down.

For your home or small business users, the off-site backup will often be on the cloud. For people/businesses with large data and/or slow connections, off-site backup often means physically taking some form of media to another location.

Keep more than one version. Every backup solution will handle this a bit differently, but the core idea is that you want to keep multiple versions of everything going back some period of time. This allows you to call forth a past version of any/all data to recover from an issue that affects the latest version.

This is especially important these days, thanks to Cryptolocker and other ransomware. A backup solution that doesn't allow you to pick a restore point prior to infection is virtually useless when faced with Cryptolocker.

Test your restores. A backup that you cannot restore is no backup at all. You should, at the very least, know how to do the restore, so you’re able to actually do it when the time comes. If this is business critical data, you should be testing your restores on some regular basis.

Now, go forth and back that data up!

ConfusedUs fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Mar 5, 2015

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ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





To get the ball rolling, I figure I'll post my home backup scheme!

My primary storage for my home is a Synology NAS. All of my laptops/desktops (I have four in my home) back up to the NAS daily. The macs use Time Machine for this.

The NAS itself is backed up to an external harddrive every day and to the cloud once a week.

This gives me three layers of redundancy (NAS + EHD + CLOUD) for all my regular systems, and the NAS itself has two layers (EHD + Cloud).

zer0spunk
Nov 6, 2000

devil never even lived
I'm currently doing RAID 1 + cloud backup. I'm going to start culling files (a lot of whats killing me are large high bit rate footage of my work) and then add in one more external hard drive copy offsite to that mix just to complete the 3 copy backup trifecta, but I feel OK knowing everything is currently mirrored offsite.

I went with backblaze.

fattredd
Mar 4, 2015

Woops
What's the most cost-effective way of backing up my junk? The most "valuable" information I have is about a terabyte of movies/shows. How many copies should I have? Is it best stored on an external drive, or in "the cloud"?

I'm taking a shot in the dark and saying that a full on NAS is overboard. What would be reasonable?

Happiness Commando
Feb 1, 2002
$$ joy at gunpoint $$

If you can easily re-download it, just do a dir /s > filez.txt and throw it on dropbox.

AgentCow007
May 20, 2004
TITLE TEXT
Wow, great timing!

I am trying to find incremental backup software for Windows so I can roll my workstation back from backups saved on my NAS. This would all be complimenting my CrashPlan backup.

I just bought Acronis True Image 2015 and it appears to be crap... it stops running and won't start again, and I absolutely loathe the Fisher-Price interface. I'm on the verge of getting a refund. Does anyone have a favorite incremental backup/"Time Machine" for Windows? I do dumb stuff, so I need an "undo" button.

AgentCow007 fucked around with this message at 12:04 on Mar 5, 2015

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





fattredd posted:

What's the most cost-effective way of backing up my junk? The most "valuable" information I have is about a terabyte of movies/shows. How many copies should I have? Is it best stored on an external drive, or in "the cloud"?

I'm taking a shot in the dark and saying that a full on NAS is overboard. What would be reasonable?

Can you replace this stuff easily? Like would it be a pain in the rear end to re-rip everything? I assume it would. I'm also assuming you got this stuff legally and can't just re-torrent it in an afternoon.

If you can't easily replace it, you should follow the best practices up there: get yourself an on-site and an off-site backup with versioning. It could be rotating a couple of harddrives, or cloud based. Cloud is fine if you can upload a TB in a reasonable time frame, since your movies and music won't be changing a lot.

I'd look into something like crashplan.

A NAS could be really nice if you wanted to stream the content to multiple devices simultaneously, but I wouldn't get one JUST for backup.

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





AgentCow007 posted:

Wow, great timing!

I am trying to find incremental backup software for Windows so I can roll my workstation back from backups saved on my NAS. This would all be complimenting my CrashPlan backup.

I just bought Acronis True Image 2015 and it appears to be crap... it stops running and won't start again, and I absolutely loathe the Fisher-Price interface. I'm on the verge of getting a refund. Does anyone have a favorite incremental backup/"Time Machine" for Windows? I do dumb stuff, so I need an "undo" button.

Crashplan can save local backups, I believe. I'd just use that.

Crashplan > NAS & Cloud

Edit: Unless you're looking for a complete "image" backup? If so, Acronis is actually one of the best. Carbonite has a "Mirror Image" option also, but it has some pretty steep limitations.

The Gunslinger
Jul 24, 2004

Do not forget the face of your father.
Fun Shoe
I really dislike Crashplan, numerous times I've encountered sync problems between clients due to version differences resulting from fubar'd upgrades. Becomes an absolute nightmare to troubleshoot, often requiring multiple reinstalls to sync everything back up. This is a problem with auto-update on their end and it continues to surface every now and then, I've seen it happen to a number of clients over the years. They don't seem to bother with official packages for various NAS distros too and the user ones are often broken by changes. The backup inheritance is also confusing for users and I've had a few clients accidentally kill their archive set because of a stupid pop up related to it, often precipitated by a client version mismatch and some other nonsense.

That said I've yet to find anything better for end users but if anyone has a recommendation I would love to check out an alternative.

edit: wow that was typed like poo poo, corrected some language.

The Gunslinger fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Mar 5, 2015

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





The Gunslinger posted:

I really dislike Crashplan, numerous times I've encountered between clients due to version differences due to fubar'd upgrades. Becomes an absolute nightmare to troubleshoot, often requiring multiple reinstalls to sync everything back up. This is a problem with auto-update on their end and it continues to surface every now and then, I've seen it happen to a number of clients over the years. They don't seem to bother with official packages for various NAS distros too and the user ones are often broken by changes. The backup inheritance is also confusing for users and I've had a few clients accidentally kill their archive set because of a stupid pop up related to it, often precipitated by a client version mismatch and some other nonsense.

That said I've yet to find anything better for end users but if anyone has a recommendation I would love to check out an alternative.

All of the consumer-level backup applications are more or less the same. Each has its own quirks, limitations, and drawbacks. They all have mostly the same result, and even act mostly the same on the backend. This includes Carbonite, Crashplan, and Backblaze.

So try one of the others and see what you think. Crashplan tends to freak out if your data size is large (over 2TB you're more or less guaranteed to have issues). Carbonite hates large file counts (several million) but size doesn't matter much. I'm not as familiar with Backblaze.

They all cost about the same and all have free trials, so give them a shot and see which works for you. Crashplan is my favorite of the three, but YMMV. Carbonite's support is way better than Crashplan's but their client lacks some of the features.

This is assuming you mean Windows; it's really hard to beat Time Machine for macs. Just do a TM backup and upload that stuff to Glacier or something if you have a Mac.

Peever
Nov 14, 2004

This shit's chess, it ain't checkers! Shit. They build jails 'cause of me.
Anyone have experience with Amazon Glacier? I currently use Crash Plan as an off site backup but was thinking about adding Glacier since it is so dirt cheap.

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





Peever posted:

Anyone have experience with Amazon Glacier? I currently use Crash Plan as an off site backup but was thinking about adding Glacier since it is so dirt cheap.

Glacier is just cloud storage. You just upload your stuff to it however you want.

The big gotcha is in how long it takes to get stuff back. You can upload any time, but to download you have to request the data and there's a delay of a few hours before it's eligible for download.

It's cheap, but it's not unlimited for one price, like Crashplan or Carbonite.

jammyozzy
Dec 7, 2006

Is that a challenge?
I have a question about the Crashplan Family plan. I was thinking of signing up for it and then adding my family's computers (we all live seperately) but I'm kind of anxious. How exactly do files from each computer get organised? Is there a seperate directory for each computer on the plan, or is everything thrown into one directory as the clients see it? And presumably, other members with access to the account can delete my stuff, yes?

ConfusedUs posted:

Crashplan tends to freak out if your data size is large (over 2TB you're more or less guaranteed to have issues). Carbonite hates large file counts (several million) but size doesn't matter much. I'm not as familiar with Backblaze.

They all cost about the same and all have free trials, so give them a shot and see which works for you. Crashplan is my favorite of the three, but YMMV. Carbonite's support is way better than Crashplan's but their client lacks some of the features.

Could you elaborate a little more on what issues are likely? I don't have 2TB of stuff at the moment but my long term plan is to build a NAS and chuck my DVD collection on there amongst other things. Especially if I sign up for the family plan and get my sister involved we'll easily surpass 2TB without much effort. :ohdear:

Thirdly, is there any other service that does a family/multi-PC bundle? Crashplan's 10 device limit means I can do literally every device my direct family owns but if there's any alternatives out there for around the same price I'd be all ears.

Cenodoxus
Mar 29, 2012

while [[ true ]] ; do
    pour()
done


I went the NAS+Crashplan route. My combined archives just broke 1.2TB, so I'm curious to know what issues people are seeing above the 2TB mark.

One thing I appreciate about Crashplan's backup offering vs. Carbonite or Backblaze is the availability of a Linux client and their support for (or indifference toward) backing up network shares. The Linux client makes no distinction between network shares and local directories, so it's as easy as installing the Crashplan service on a Linux host, mapping your NAS over SMB or NFS, and setting it up in the Crashplan application as a backup set.

You can do the same thing on the Windows client but it involves a workaround, i.e. mounting the share under the SYSTEM account.

Backup sets are another plus for me - you can specify different sets of folders to back up, each with its own priority, scan interval, backup period, etc. I've got a set for personal documents with highest priority and a 15-minute rescan time, another set for media with slightly lower priority and an hourly rescan time, and VMs with the lowest priority and daily rescan. The app is incredibly flexible.

I used to have pretty shoddy performance backing up to their cloud - 2-3Mbps tops on what was at the time a 10Mbps upstream connection - but they've made great strides in the last year with their network and mid-2014 I started getting the full 10Mbps up. Now on my new ISP I can push 500Mbps during the day with no problems.

The Gunslinger
Jul 24, 2004

Do not forget the face of your father.
Fun Shoe

ConfusedUs posted:

All of the consumer-level backup applications are more or less the same. Each has its own quirks, limitations, and drawbacks. They all have mostly the same result, and even act mostly the same on the backend. This includes Carbonite, Crashplan, and Backblaze.

So try one of the others and see what you think. Crashplan tends to freak out if your data size is large (over 2TB you're more or less guaranteed to have issues). Carbonite hates large file counts (several million) but size doesn't matter much. I'm not as familiar with Backblaze.

They all cost about the same and all have free trials, so give them a shot and see which works for you. Crashplan is my favorite of the three, but YMMV. Carbonite's support is way better than Crashplan's but their client lacks some of the features.

This is assuming you mean Windows; it's really hard to beat Time Machine for macs. Just do a TM backup and upload that stuff to Glacier or something if you have a Mac.

Tell me about it, my girlfriend has a Mac and Time Machine is a loving godsend. I don't know how backup is still so terrible with Windows after decades of development, its such a basic need and Windows users especially (malware, etc) would've benefited the most from a decent backup solution. I will give Backblaze a shot I guess and see how it goes.

AgentCow007
May 20, 2004
TITLE TEXT

ConfusedUs posted:

Unless you're looking for a complete "image" backup? If so, Acronis is actually one of the best. Carbonite has a "Mirror Image" option also, but it has some pretty steep limitations.

Yeah, I was looking for something to "roll back" my OS drive by minutes or hours when I do something stupid. Unfortunately, it appears that the latest version is watered-down and crappy. I had their tech-support remote access my computer for over an hour getting it to work, and then it stopped working again a few hours later... all on a fresh format/Windows install. I've had it for 3 days and it's been failing most of the time... which doesn't exactly inspire confidence in a backup scheme, even if they could make it work eventually. I went ahead and filed for a refund.

I'm looking at Macrium, even though it costs a bit more. I've used their free stuff to migrate drives a few times and it worked great.

Peever
Nov 14, 2004

This shit's chess, it ain't checkers! Shit. They build jails 'cause of me.

jammyozzy posted:

I have a question about the Crashplan Family plan. I was thinking of signing up for it and then adding my family's computers (we all live seperately) but I'm kind of anxious. How exactly do files from each computer get organised? Is there a seperate directory for each computer on the plan, or is everything thrown into one directory as the clients see it? And presumably, other members with access to the account can delete my stuff, yes?


Each computer will install the Crash Plan client and then sync up with your account. You then select the folders/directories that you want CrashPlan to monitor and it will back up to their servers under the computers "name". I'm not at my pc now but from I recall you don't see other computers from your plan within the client. From the website you can see all the computers associated with your plan. So no I don't believe you can accidentally or intentionally delete files from computer "A" while accessing the client from computer "B". If you're the only one with access to the website you should be fine.

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





jammyozzy posted:

Could you elaborate a little more on what issues are likely? I don't have 2TB of stuff at the moment but my long term plan is to build a NAS and chuck my DVD collection on there amongst other things. Especially if I sign up for the family plan and get my sister involved we'll easily surpass 2TB without much effort. :ohdear:
ny alternatives out there for around the same price I'd be all ears.

My experience both personal and amongst friends/internet buddies is that Crashplan really chokes speed- and stability- wise once you get a lot of data, more than about 2TB or so. There used to be a way to modify some registry keys to allocate more memory to Crashplan, which would usually help. Last I looked (~9 months ago) it was on their website.

jammyozzy
Dec 7, 2006

Is that a challenge?

Peever posted:

...If you're the only one with access to the website you should be fine.

Perfect, that's good to know thanks.

ConfusedUs posted:

My experience both personal and amongst friends/internet buddies is that Crashplan really chokes speed- and stability- wise once you get a lot of data, more than about 2TB or so. There used to be a way to modify some registry keys to allocate more memory to Crashplan, which would usually help. Last I looked (~9 months ago) it was on their website.

Ah okay, so you're talking about the client rather than the back end storage, right? I'm the only person in my family likely to have that much data on one machine, but I don't wanna upload it and have it implode everybody's data. :ohdear:

So, my next dumb question, does anybody know if the FreeNAS client is similarly affected?

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





Yeah the client

Back-end is pretty solid. No problems that I'm aware of.

jammyozzy
Dec 7, 2006

Is that a challenge?
Alright sold, thanks for the help guys.

alo
May 1, 2005


Do you have lots of data and lots of free time? Tape may be in your future.

No seriously, I did this and it actually worked out pretty well. I'd be happy to answer any questions if anyone is seriously considering it.

Methylethylaldehyde
Oct 23, 2004

BAKA BAKA

alo posted:

Do you have lots of data and lots of free time? Tape may be in your future.

No seriously, I did this and it actually worked out pretty well. I'd be happy to answer any questions if anyone is seriously considering it.

I actually have a LTO-5 tape autoloader I picked up really cheap to backup my home goodies. I recently learned that cleaning tapes that say "up to 50 cleanings!" means "10, tops, dude". After a few cleanings you're just smearing the poo poo around as the paper towel falls apart in your hand.

My setup is a hilarious rube goldberg contraption of various technologies piled on top of one-another like a house of cards.
Main server is an OmniOS solaris distro with napp-it as the management frontend. The underlying datastores are a pair of 10 disk 3TB and 4TB RAIDZ2 (raid6 equivalent) volumes. Those volumes are shared out via COMSTAR iSCSI to my Hyper-V box, which has a pair of Windows server 2012 VMs on it. One of those VMs is a file server that shares out data to the rest of my network, the other is a System Center DPM server that I use to spin off my 25TB of crap to tape on a quarterly basis.

alo
May 1, 2005


What's really cheap?

I'm on LTO-3 since it's less than 100 dollars per drive (I also have an autoloader sitting around, also cheap). I figure that once LTO-5 prices come down on the used market, I'll transition from 3 to 5 (since it's 2 generations newer).

I'm also running OmniOS, but with fewer drives and VMware instead of hyper-v. My backup software is Bareos (bacula fork). I do daily backups of my local and remote machines, then dump them to tape monthly. Media and everything else gets written to tape whenever.

In addition to tape, I have some really irreplaceable data mirrored at a remote site (zfs snapshots) and an extra copy that I update yearly in a safe.

Definitely not bullet-proof, but my data doesn't rely on 3rd party services and it's in enough locations.

Methylethylaldehyde
Oct 23, 2004

BAKA BAKA

alo posted:

What's really cheap?

I'm on LTO-3 since it's less than 100 dollars per drive (I also have an autoloader sitting around, also cheap). I figure that once LTO-5 prices come down on the used market, I'll transition from 3 to 5 (since it's 2 generations newer).

I'm also running OmniOS, but with fewer drives and VMware instead of hyper-v. My backup software is Bareos (bacula fork). I do daily backups of my local and remote machines, then dump them to tape monthly. Media and everything else gets written to tape whenever.

In addition to tape, I have some really irreplaceable data mirrored at a remote site (zfs snapshots) and an extra copy that I update yearly in a safe.

Definitely not bullet-proof, but my data doesn't rely on 3rd party services and it's in enough locations.

I got the whole thing, plus about 90 tapes from an office closure sale for $500. It was a loving steal.

My tapes are encrypted and stuffed in a locked toolbox and kept in a cabinet at my office as an offsite location. I really should set up some DPM agents on my personal machines and do bare metal backups or at least back up my documents, but 99% of my crap is stored on the network drive, so I'm out maybe 3 hours rebuilding my machine completely if it dies in a fire.

The windows shares have VSS enabled, and the users I map the shares with don't have VSS admin rights, so even if I got cryptolockered, unless it ran on my domain admin account, the VSS shares are safe.

Edit: The best part is the backup process takes ~7-9 days at 100MB/sec.

Methylethylaldehyde fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Mar 6, 2015

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





I hate tapes. :colbert:

I recognize that they have their uses, but I still hate tapes.

Methylethylaldehyde
Oct 23, 2004

BAKA BAKA

ConfusedUs posted:

I hate tapes. :colbert:

I recognize that they have their uses, but I still hate tapes.

They're great in that I can run a batch, drop them in a toolbox and ignore the gently caress out of them for a year or ten. When things aren't 100% perfect, they're such a huge pain in the dick it's not even funny. Tapes for critical production is why I said gently caress all that and did my nightlies to disk, and ran weeklies to tape. And kept like a month of weeklies on disk too. Tape job fails? Who gives a gently caress, retry it after soothing whatever bullshit error it's throwing this time.

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





Lots of home backup chat in here, which I expected, but we're open to business backup chat too!

I'm pretty knowledgeable about Windows Server backups so if anyone wants to know anything, such as why VSS flips out if you back up the same MSSSQL database with two different applications, just let me know.

Aunt Beth
Feb 24, 2006

Baby, you're ready!
Grimey Drawer
Anyone know of a program like CrashPlan that allows home users to do peer-to-peer backups? I've been less than pleased with the CrashPlan client lately and was wondering if there were any better (or at least competing) products.

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





Not that I know of.

You could roll your own thing if your systems are on the same network.

Robocopy or rsync could do it for you, if you can script.

alkanphel
Mar 24, 2004

ConfusedUs posted:

The NAS itself is backed up to an external harddrive every day and to the cloud once a week.

If your NAS is pretty large, for example 10GB, how would you back that up to external HDs?

Sheep
Jul 24, 2003
Good timing on this. We've got like forty laptops at work that aren't part of the domain and don't have any sort of backup software on them so its just a matter of time before one dies and some user loses all their poo poo because they ignore my warnings to always work on the server via RDP (which IS backed up).

What are some good business options for something like this? Crashplan is the only system I have personal experience with but I'm totally clueless how it works in a business instead of personal setup.

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





alkanphel posted:

If your NAS is pretty large, for example 10GB, how would you back that up to external HDs?

You have a few choices

1) Use a backup program that allows you to create customized backup sets, and use multiple EHDs.
2) Roll your own backup script (robocopy or rsync, as appropriate), and use multiple EHDs.
3) Invest in a second large array to use as a backup target.
4) Invest in a tape drive.


I prefer #1. Rolling your own backup is perfectly fine, but I dislike maintaining it. #3 is expensive. I hate tapes.

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





Sheep posted:

Good timing on this. We've got like forty laptops at work that aren't part of the domain and don't have any sort of backup software on them so its just a matter of time before one dies and some user loses all their poo poo because they ignore my warnings to always work on the server via RDP (which IS backed up).

What are some good business options for something like this? Crashplan is the only system I have personal experience with but I'm totally clueless how it works in a business instead of personal setup.

Good luck. If you were on a domain you could force a solution through software deployments and GPOs, but since you're not...

You could invest in something like a crashplan or carbonite sub for each computer, and hope the users don't disable it. Someone probably will.

Or you could make it official policy to work on the server via RDP (or create some network shares, or whatever) and just say "tough poo poo" when things go badly. When, not if.

If it goes badly enough, you can leverage that to get your systems on a goddamned domain so you can prevent the issue.

SlayVus
Jul 10, 2009
Grimey Drawer
What is the best way to back up when you have slow upload speeds? My cable provider sucks for their upload speeds, 50 Mbps down with 4 Mbps up. I really don't have anything sensitive that can't be stored on a flash drive though. Really, I don't have anything sensitive at all. Store all my passwords with last pass, don't have anything like wills or such. All my data is games or TV or movies.

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





SlayVus posted:

What is the best way to back up when you have slow upload speeds? My cable provider sucks for their upload speeds, 50 Mbps down with 4 Mbps up. I really don't have anything sensitive that can't be stored on a flash drive though. Really, I don't have anything sensitive at all. Store all my passwords with last pass, don't have anything like wills or such. All my data is games or TV or movies.

4Mbps isn't terrible. If you have a couple TB, yeah, maybe it'll take a few weeks. But you should be good after that.

(Edit: Crashplan offers a seeding option in the US where you ship them your data on an EHD)

If you really can't do cloud, you can always rotate some externals and physically take one off-site on a regular basis.

ConfusedUs fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Mar 8, 2015

Ika
Dec 30, 2004
Pure insanity

I'm looking for windows based synchronization software that can store a database of checksums / hashes so that it doesn't have to reparse everything every time I run it.

What I currently have set up for backup is
System drive -> regular images ( macrium )
Important data / photos / code -> mirrored to NAS, and occasionally USB drives which I store in the office / parents / etc. Most of these folders are also shared read only on my network so I can access them from other PCs.
unimportant data -> mirror to NAS. Also read only access

However right now I usually manually sync the folders. I would like use some software which can store a database of checksums on the target drive of the drive's current state. Then worst case it needs to rehash the local content, ideally this would only be done if modify time / filesize changed. Keeping removed / changes files in a dedicated folder for X days would be cool, but isn't necessary if I can see a preview of what actions will be taken.

I tried synctoy but it always froze. I am thinking about trying freefilesync but a review said it tries to install spyware which is a big red flag, and I can't tell whether it can store a version DB from the website. There is also DirSync Pro but it lists as a feature Uses no local database, so no overhead which is pretty much the opposite of what I want.

So, any suggestions?


E: The nas is a basic synology unit, I have tried using the cloudsync but for some reason that ended up not working properly.

Ika fucked around with this message at 14:50 on Mar 8, 2015

Sheep
Jul 24, 2003

ConfusedUs posted:

Good luck. If you were on a domain you could force a solution through software deployments and GPOs, but since you're not...

You could invest in something like a crashplan or carbonite sub for each computer, and hope the users don't disable it. Someone probably will.

Or you could make it official policy to work on the server via RDP (or create some network shares, or whatever) and just say "tough poo poo" when things go badly. When, not if.

If it goes badly enough, you can leverage that to get your systems on a goddamned domain so you can prevent the issue.

I've got people who can remote in and install software on the machines - the problem is figuring out what backup software would be best for the job. They're all remote users and the laptops are only brought into the offices like once a month if ever, thus why they're not part of the domain - Windows 7 Pro doesn't include DirectAccess and I can't convince finance to spring for 50 upgrades to Ultimate here.

Assuming Windows 10 includes DirectAccess in Professional they'll be coming on board with the domain but otherwise it's just a case of "I need some way to get 50 laptops backing up to some online provider without clobbering each others' stuff, all while being billed to a single account/invoice". Getting the software onto the laptops isn't an issue really so much as figuring out what would be best here. I was thinking Crashplan but I only have experience using the family plan so I was hoping someone else might have some suggestions or comments.

The users don't have local admin so disabling backups isn't an issue if it's UAC protected or whatever.

Flipperwaldt
Nov 11, 2011

Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?



Ika posted:

So, any suggestions?
I don't know what SyncBack Free does in the background and whether it keeps a database of hashes or whatever. I know it compares tens of thousands of files in tens of seconds, which is probably all anyone should care about.

It'll do pretty much anything you could require from a syncing program and should IMO be the default recommendation where SyncToy is too simple and a specific need for a command line tool isn't present.

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Ika
Dec 30, 2004
Pure insanity

Flipperwaldt posted:

I don't know what SyncBack Free does in the background and whether it keeps a database of hashes or whatever. I know it compares tens of thousands of files in tens of seconds, which is probably all anyone should care about.

It'll do pretty much anything you could require from a syncing program and should IMO be the default recommendation where SyncToy is too simple and a specific need for a command line tool isn't present.

I'll take a look at that, I hadn't hear of it before. The help file does list a "fast backup" feature which uses a database, but that's disabled in the free version, and the free version's options by default don't do file hashing. If it ends up doing what I want then I may just buy it, a couple of dollars is a lot cheaper than adding a database to one of the opensource projects. Or maybe I can get it to do hashing of files under 50mb in size and skip hashing for larger files.

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