Re: Backup for Home PC and Laptop

One thing to consider about using a cloud based backup system ... how easy is it going to be to recover your machine if the hard drive goes casters up?

I've had a number of hard drives fail at work ... while recovering the data from a cloud based backup is fine ... I doubt it's going to be feasible to backup the entire system to the cloud.

At work I backup my workstation to a 500gb USB hard drive ... it's saved my butt on more than one occasion.

If I didn't have a local backup, I would have had to ... 1) Get a new hard drive, 2) Reinstall the OS, 3) Update the OS, 4) Remember & find all the software I had installed, 5) Reinstall all the software, 6) Update all the software, 7) Recover my data. Based on my recent migration to a new machine at work, I would estimate it to take about 2-3 days to have basic functionality back ... 5-6 days to be back where I was before the failure.

With a local backup all I had to do was 1) Get a new hard drive, 2) Boot the recovery CD, 3) Restore the machine to the last backup (usually less than 6 hours old). Based on experience, this takes about 3-4 hours max (assuming there's a long line at Frys).

I would suggest using a local backup for hardware failure protection ... because you're going to be able to restore the system pretty quickly.

For data protection, use a solid & reputable cloud backup system.

For security purposes ... I would also suggest you consider encrypting your data before backing it up to a cloud based service.

Perhaps use truecrypt to for the data ... use the mounted truecrypt volume for the data ... and backup the truecrypt container file to the cloud.

david