How do you do off-site backups?

[hafr]

Right now, I have time machine backing up every house to a FW800 drive and CCC cloning my drive once a day. The problem is that both of these backups are on-site, so if something happens (God forbid) to the place my iMac is, I will still lose my data, besides the files I keep on Dropbox.

So, my question is how to you guys and gals do your off-site backups? I was just going to buy a drive and pretty much clone my time machine drive and store it somewhere else like a family members house or something. However, I don't want to have to go all the way over there, bring the drive home, clone it, and drive back every day. I looked into online backup solutions, but with several gigabytes changing every day, my Internet connection would slow down most of the day.

Every monday morning, I disconnect one of my backup drives and put it in my bag. At the office, I exchange it for the drive I have lying in the desk and I plug it in when I get home. So double hard drives at home (one TM, one CCC like you ), one hard drive at work and I actually use both SugerSync (because Syncplicity decided to not play nice with Mountain Lion) and Dropbox for smaller documents.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

We keep everything on a Synology NAS, and have another computer off site that VPN's into the NAS and copies everything off of it onto its internal drive. Since we mostly deal with word documents, images, and an occasional PDF it works great.

The best part is that except for an occasional checkup it's worry free and hassile free.

 

[Windowsrefugee]

* To OP. CP is very versatile. It will obviously take a very long time to get fully backed up on line to CP Central. In the meantime, you could backup your computer(s) to a HDD via your fastest port-- that will probably take less than a day. Then take it over to computer across town belonging to friend or relative, connect HDD and set it as CP destination for your computer(s)' CP backup. The incremental back ups are usually really fast and you will have an off-site backup in just a day--eventually you will have 2 off-site back ups so you can sleep well at night knowing your data can be retrieved if disaster strikes.

 

[flynz4]

For those of you doing an initial Crashplan+ backup... here is a fairly painless way to do it.

First... make a static copy of all your data onto a USB drive which you can store offsite. You now have a snapshot to use until your initial backup is loaded into the cloud.

The next steps are to prioritize your data based on a few criteria, such as criticality of data, size, and dynamic nature of the data. Then, only turn on the backup of various data types in phases. For me, I used the following order... with the approximate time to backup the data.

1) Documents: Highly dynamic, very small in size, critical... fully backed up in a few hours.
2) Photos: Relatively static, most critical of all my data, fairly large in size... fully backed up in a few days
3) Music: Relatively static, not critical, very large... backed up in about a week.
4) Video: Relatively static, not critical, huge... backed up in a couple of weeks.

At each step... you keep adding the new backup source... but of course you keep the previous steps turned on. CP+ prioritizes new data... so after the first few hours, when you turn on photos... your dynamic documents will continue to be backed up ahead of the photo data not yet backed up. Likewise... in a few days, your photos are all backed up, and will continue to be prioritized over the music and video. Eventually, everything is turned on, and eventually everything is backed up. However, your most important data was backed up first.

After everything is backed up... you can erase the drive where you manually stored your original data.

My original backup was about 500+ GB. My CP+ data is now 1.5TB. It took me a few years too have my data set grow to this large size... but CP+ is so painless, I never even realized it was running... and it easily kept up with my growing data library.

/Jim

 

[astronomerroyal]

I run CCC every month to create bootable drive of my OS drive (it's a shame it cannot clone external drives to the same drive as well).

comatory, you can partition your CCC backup drive into a partition for each disk you want to clone, in which case it can clone them all onto the same physical drive but on different partitions. This is what I do and it works for me.

 

[comatory]

comatory, you can partition your CCC backup drive into a partition for each disk you want to clone, in which case it can clone them all onto the same physical drive but on different partitions. This is what I do and it works for me.

Sweet! This changes everything. I'll be using Crashplan for few more months and then I'll get couple of 1TB usb2.0 drives (speed is ok for archiving), I'll rotate them and put them in my in-laws' house (100km away,should be safe). I go there once or twice a month.

 

[maflynn]

So, my question is how to you guys and gals do your off-site backups?

I have a portable drive that I take to my office. At some point, I bring it home, use CCC to clone my drive and bring it back to the office.

Easy Peasy

 

[snberk103]

I keep offsite backups in my garage. It's far enough away from my house that it won't burn in case of fire.

Only you can judge how safe is "safe enough".... but I can think of lots of scenarios that involve both a house and a distant garage. The point of an off-site backup is to protect against the rare disasters - a house fire is actually quite rare. But then too is a flood, or windstorm, grass-fire.

My impression is that in my part of the world, more homes burn down during forest fires and other wide area incidents than singly. (I'm not including small fires in the home (like a kitchen fire) because these rarely impact your on-site data - just homes that are a total loss due to fire.)

---

TM all the time. Nightly cloned backup to an external HDD. Important docs go to Dropbox. Every so often I take one of the cloned drives and swap it for the drive in our safety deposit box at the bank. Which reminds me... it's time for the swap. I generally wait until I have a new important project done.