...is what?

I don't want to use one of those cloud services and pay a monthly fee and have them all connected to my silly little secondhand PC.

I used to use a program called "DiskFit" that backed up everything from your Macintosh SE running System 6 onto a stack of 3½" floppies. It kept track of wich files needed backing up and which ones hadn't changed since the last backup.

It was also 1987.

My silly little secondhance PC, an HP elitebook 6930p that I got on eBay for ≈150 dollars, runs 64-bit Windows 7 and has Office 2013 and LibreOffice 5 and a Pascal compiler and a Python interpreter and MySQL and not much else. I expect my data files (not program files) taken all together take up less than 5MB of space.

Is there some cheaply priced software that can manage a backup of my little collection of files onto, say, a USB thumb drive, in the same sort of keep-track-of-it-for-you way that DiskFit did?

Thanks.


Also, all computing in the world should be migrated to vintage Macinti running System 6 and connected by AppleTalk.

Yes, FreeCommander or TotalCommander or other similar software. I use them instead of Microsoft Explorer and they are very convenient for doing the weekly external drive backup, too.

BartSimpson wrote:

Yes, FreeCommander or TotalCommander or other similar software. I use them instead of Microsoft Explorer and they are very convenient for doing the weekly external drive backup, too.

Graciasopolis (that's Spanish for Greek).

I shall investimagate those options.





(Especially once an AppleTalk version comes out.)

rsync
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync
Probably already installed if you run MacOS.
You will need to read a little to learn it but it is what many "pros" (and amateurs as me) use.

I pay $10 a month with Crashplan....I am a semi-pro photographer and if, God forbid, my house burns down, earthquake, etc I do not want all my hard work going up in smoke...much more efficient than DVDs/Tapes/ whatever... AND having to hoof a second copy off site...

Backup? What's a backup?

Signed,
My wife.

Remember the rule of three - three copies, on two different mediums, one offsite. Otherwise it's not a backup.

And whatever you choose, regularly test restoring from it. Otherwise it's not a backup.

moo wrote:

mediums

Media.


#pedantrypervades

We used a local Local RAID and we backed it up further to Carbonite. We had a major failure a couple of years ago. Lightning killed the RAID and the PC along with other things in the house like the Directv boxes. Lighting hit a tree in the yard. We got a new PC and signed into Carbonite and got everything back. Worth every penny.

Now we just use an NAS for our photos which backs up with Carbonite Pro along with the PC. That said, we’re converting to Mac so we’ll lose the local NAS backup which is kind of a bummer (no support for an NAS with a Mac), but we can use an external drive on a Mac and have it backup that way to Carbonite.

We’ve also begun archiving our pictures and important documents to M-Disks which should last through our kids lifetimes and their kids lifetimes. What they choose to do with them is their decision, hopefully they can have a similar archival system. Someone is going to hack something like Carbonite someday and all these people relying on the cloud for their storage are going to get burned. We put an M-Disc copy in the basement in a fireproof safe, one to a safe deposit box at the bank and one to each of the kids. It’s been time consuming and was expensive to get the burner and first batch of discs going, but losing everything like we did scared the hell out of us. Now we just burn a new desk when we reach a point where we can fill one up.

Price has come down a ton on the M-Disc drive for anyone that wants one. Ours was $129:

https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/ac ... 8880073173

Disks remain a little pricey, but you can get high capacity versions:

https://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-M-Disc- ... -disc&th=1

They say a useful life of hundreds of years, but the kids can find another storage medium as it becomes available. Hopefully there will be some form of physical media they can use to store the data, but I doubt it will exist. Nevertheless, we have it. Like I said, at some point cloud storage methods will implode be it accidental or otherwise. It will be a disaster.

Best $100 a year we’ve spent.

On the topic of the Cloud Based storage systems... How bad is the initial upload?

I'm a bit of an oddball in that I recognize a wide variety of dangers and then proceed to do nothing about them. I firmly agree with the concept that data doesn't actually exist unless it's in at least two separate, distinct places that can't be wiped out at the same time without a catastrophe beyond something normal (like your house burning down *or* remote storage being hacked/destroyed/etc.).

One of the things that's kept me from using something like Carbonite is simply the annoyance of the initial upload of everything I want to save. Based on this topic, I opened by Dropbox (I have only a free 2GB account) and checked what I actually have backed up, which is about 1/9th of my MyDocuments folder. I have 1 GB free, so I could save an extra 9th if necessary). I'm uploading something I didn't have saved (all my emails from college), which added up to about 170 megs, and that's taking about 2 minutes. I can't imagine saving hundreds upon hundreds of GB that I have in my 1 TB and 320 GB storage drives. But... I probably wouldn't backup everything on those, so it wouldn't be quite that bad. Just not necessary to save a few hundred GB that I can always recover or haven't used in a decade plus.

In terms of physical storage, does anyone use a safe deposit box for an off-site backup? What do you use, an external HD? I have a couple externals that I use, but they're both here at home. Like I said before, I recognize that that doesn't help much in some circumstances (e.g. if there was a fire), though not useless (e.g. if just my computer itself died), but I've been really lazy about just going to my bank to get a deposit box and then actually remembering to bring it home to backup occasionally. How do you remember? Just sort of leave yourself a note to do it every so often?

cjg225 wrote:

On the topic of the Cloud Based storage systems... How bad is the initial upload?

I'm a bit of an oddball in that I recognize a wide variety of dangers and then proceed to do nothing about them. I firmly agree with the concept that data doesn't actually exist unless it's in at least two separate, distinct places that can't be wiped out at the same time without a catastrophe beyond something normal (like your house burning down *or* remote storage being hacked/destroyed/etc.).

One of the things that's kept me from using something like Carbonite is simply the annoyance of the initial upload of everything I want to save. Based on this topic, I opened by Dropbox (I have only a free 2GB account) and checked what I actually have backed up, which is about 1/9th of my MyDocuments folder. I have 1 GB free, so I could save an extra 9th if necessary). I'm uploading something I didn't have saved (all my emails from college), which added up to about 170 megs, and that's taking about 2 minutes. I can't imagine saving hundreds upon hundreds of GB that I have in my 1 TB and 320 GB storage drives. But... I probably wouldn't backup everything on those, so it wouldn't be quite that bad. Just not necessary to save a few hundred GB that I can always recover or haven't used in a decade plus.

In terms of physical storage, does anyone use a safe deposit box for an off-site backup? What do you use, an external HD? I have a couple externals that I use, but they're both here at home. Like I said before, I recognize that that doesn't help much in some circumstances (e.g. if there was a fire), though not useless (e.g. if just my computer itself died), but I've been really lazy about just going to my bank to get a deposit box and then actually remembering to bring it home to backup occasionally. How do you remember? Just sort of leave yourself a note to do it every so often?

First upload was brutal. I think it took five days. It then runs in the background when you load new files. To download everything from Carbonite after the fail took a couple of hours. We have literally thousands of pictures and digital SLR shots take up a lot of space when you use the RAW format that you should. One of these days we’ll have to sit down and dump the ones we don’t want. The price of no consequence in having to buy film is terrible for us.

The initial full backup can tak a while depending on what you have selected snd your bandwidth. Mine took about a week for 2Tb..and diffs run in the background and can be configured based on system resources and availability.

Thanks for the info. Might have to look into it and let it run overnight a few times.

Frankly, there aren’t many good solutions for backup. And certainly no “one size fits all” thing. I do recommend doing backup to a cloud, such as Amazon S3. I remember looking into a program called CloudBerry Backup, which is free for personal use, and can work with Amazon S3 storage for rather cheap online space.