Over the Christmas and New Year's, I struck up a conversation with a few people (on separate occasions) regarding backing up their data and syncing data across computers.
I'm actually surprised that a not whole lot of people back up their data (or a weak way of backing up), especially since we have pretty much gone totally digital in way of documents, music, ibooks, and especially pictures & videos
To some, this may seem overkill, but here's what we have setup.
I have a MacPro server that is in charge of backing and syncing everything across our network.
First we have time machine running backing up to a Drobo. So far, I've experienced 2 hard drives that failed on me, but due to nature of Drobo, I just replaced the drive and did not experience any down time at all. I highly recommend this drive!
Second, I have gone through numerous syncing utilities (Apple's home sync, goodsync, cronosync, synchronize Pro, and more I can't remember) I have also tried the online type backup and currently use things like dropbox, and bitcasa, but they don't really allow the full syncing of your whole home folder and they are really meant for sharing with friends. I have finally settled with Synk by decimus. This is the only program that I could find that allows you to sync the whole hard drive live. The idea is that I have 3 laptops on my network. I want the ability pick up any of my laptops and have everything with me. I also have synk running to an offsite online NAS drive locked up in a fireproof safe so that my data is not in the same place as the office, but still on the same property.
Finally, for further insurance, we use an online unlimited backup called CrashPlan. I've used others such as Carbonite, but it took 3 years to back up my whole hard drive whereas Crashplan did it in 3 months! Crashplan also has a bunch of nice options such as throttling your bandwidth during use, etc. All for cheaper then Carbonite (depending on the plan you purchase). I've looked at other online backup plans such as SugarSync, dropbox, but it seems that it's difficult to find unlimited backup. Bitcasa looks promising, but I still question how it'll work in the real life.
How about you? Are you as crazy as me? Any other backup plans that you use that are better then what we are using? Let me know!
Mikegyver.com
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