Best Home Backup Strategy Now?

jollyreaper writes "Technology moves quickly and what was conventional wisdom last year can be folly this year. But the one thing that's remained constant is hard drives are far too large to backup via conventional means. Tape is expensive and can be unreliable, though it certainly has its proponents. DVDs are just too small. There are prosumer devices like the Drobo, but it's still just a giant box of hard drives, basically RAID. And as we've all had drilled into our heads, 'RAID is not backup.' When last this topic came up on Slashdot, the consensus was that hard drives were the best way to backup hard drives. Backup your internal HDD to an external one, and if your data is really important, have two externals and swap one off-site once a week. Is there any better advice these days?"

Comments

Re:Do we have to bring this up over and over again

[jtheisen]

Ok, that covers the <5% of users who can set up and maintain a backup systems based on rsync. What about the other 95%?

As an interface to set up a backup system for a moderately adept geek with sufficient focus to set up and maintain a recurring rsync backup, an above average grasp of the layout of their filesystem, and the presence of mind to alter their rsync script as their computer changes over time, rsync is extremely powerful. For everyone else, it's next to useless.

So can anybody say something to rsync-like features in other backup software? Surely there should be loads of commercial ones that do this differential copying thing?

Re:SSD

[Architect_sasyr]

No problem.

suspect: imagine to be the case or true or probable; "I suspect he is a fugitive"; "I surmised that the butler did it"

Dictionary Words for When you are trying to be smart