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where is your repo?
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Whatever came with the tape drive.
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Acronis True Image for the workstations, Windows server backup for the Servers. We have been scoffed at for using Windows Server Backup but I don't honestly know why. It's just plain bitchin. Does bare metal restore of everything - even exchange and file by file if you just need one back. Same as Acronis. What's more, Acronis can and will restore a Windows Server Backup VXD to dissimilar hardware, where Windows Server Backup does not.
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Ah yes, "bare metal" is what I need. I've used ATI in the past, went to disk imaging as it was much, much faster. Of course, it helped that I could pop out the hard drive on my Dell Precision in 20 seconds.
Thx Ron
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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OneDrive seems pretty good.
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For bare metal or just dev areas? I can copy files with the best of them. Just curious as to your procedure.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Just documents and files - they are hard to replace whilst restoring a drive might take a couple of days but it's pretty straightforward and, unless a disaster strikes, not a frequent operation. Besides, I'm paranoid enough to also backup to a nas box. 
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Paranoia is good .
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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OneDrive chokes when used for code backup. It cannot handle all the intermediate and output files created by build processes. It just stops syncing, never completing its "scanning for changes... " routine. This is with the pro plan (1 TB).
Happened to me twice. Took an act of congress to get sync working again. Now I use git repos outside OneDrive for all my code storage and all is well.
For OS and app backup I use Acronis True Image. Fast, flexible, reliable, but not cheap. Then again, what would you give in an emergency to get your data back?
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I back up code as files only. I use TFS[^] online for real code backup. Has not caused a problem and means I have the code in a number of places.
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OneDrive autosync, 1TB storage with MS Office Sub.
I also then have a second drive which I use as a target for Windows File History.
Periodically, I used to do a backup image to my 10TB Raid 5 NAS, although this is rare (aka never), now that I have moved my PC more than 5000km from my NAS!
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You already know I use AOMEI Backupper, and love it! 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I have all my data and code backed up in the cloud using Carbonite. What's neat is it works in the background and automatically backs up every time a data/code file is changed. It only costs $60/year.
A few years ago, my computer suddenly died while I was working on a project. No problem. Bought a new computer, logged onto Carbonite, restored my data, and in less than a day, I was back where I left off.
Carbonite is worth its bits in gold. 
Peter Ringering
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I don't see how Carbonite can handle (a) system images and (b) massive amounts of data for $60/year?
(b) oh wait - *unlimited* storage for a system, okay, that changed the last time I looked at them. That would only be 18 hours for the initial capture, much less for incremental backups. I'll have to look into that. One issue I have is making sure I am disaster proof - fire, theft, tornado.
(a) how did it handle the system disk restore? A major pain point for me is restoring all of the installed software.
cg
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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I'm an individual developer with just 1 PC. All my data is in MS Access and SQL Server CE databases. I don't have massive amounts of data but what I do have I couldn't live without.
What I like about Carbonite is that it automatically backs up my data when my computer is idle. It doesn't hog system resources. It also only backs up data--not videos and program files unless I specifically ask it to. Since my Visual Studio code files are small in comparison, Carbonite backs them up automatically too.
Carbonite has saved me many times in the past several years.
Peter Ringering
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I used Carbonite for a couple of years, but on two occasions when I needed to restore relatively small amounts of data, the restore went unbelievably slowly - to the extent that I could not imagine trying to recover from a real disaster that way. I now use Acronis (which seems to be much more reliable and stable than it was up to a couple of years ago) for local backup, mainly of system files, to a NAS device, and CrashPlan Pro for continuous backup of documents and data. I have been very impressed with the latter program - occasional problems have been dealt with promptly by support people who know their product and care about their users.
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I use the R, because the D makes it go forward, and the P doesn't work on my machine.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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too early in the morning for this. btw, "R" is for rocket mode.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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I'm assuming you want to make 1:1 image of at least your C drive - i.e. if anything goes wrong you just want to either have it already on a drive or be able to restore an older image. For this I've used CloneZilla several years now. Many a time I screwed up an installation by fiddling with drivers and settings, and many times screwed up partitioning and/or dual-booting. If it wasn't for CloneZilla I'd have had to euthanize myself long ago. I've seen others mention stuff like Arconis. AFAIK they all do pretty much the same job as CZ. Either make a raw copy of one drive to another, or to an image file for later restore (either entire drive or per partition).
For your other drives I'd just go with a normal copying backup. Yes (as many other answers state) online stuff (like OneDrive / Dropbox / GDrive / etc.) can help, but depending on size you may not be able to use these. Probably OK for the development project files - they tend to be smallish and don't often change all at once. Although for coding I've found these auto-online-sync stuff tends to screw with the editor / IDE as the timing of the sync gets "out-of-sync" making the editor / IDE think the file's changed from outside. It would be very cumbersome for your VMs though - since all the VM virtual drives would change nearly every time you run them, meaning a near 100% upload on a daily basis (hope your bandwidth is large and fast enough).
I would likely rather just go with a local copy (at least for your E drive). To be absolutely sure, a rotating copy on 3 drives - overwriting the older backup. There are many programs which can do this on a scheduled basis, some even on an event basis as a file changes (i.e. the way OneDrive / DropBox works, only instead of to an online server, to a local path you specify). You could even setup a task schedule in Windows to perform the copy, though I'd likely go with RoboCopy instead of copy/xcopy.
Personally I use rclone on my NAS box, using DeltaCopy in Windows to backup onto the NAS. Then I've got a script on there firing when I plug in a USB drive - which simply copies the backup from the NAS's internals to the external (overwriting only newer files). But that's me - on my home LAN, and since nearly all my project files (3d models) tend to be huge (even in relation to video files) - nothing strange to see several GB per file (i.e. similar in size to your VM files).
For your D drive I might be tempted to use a versioning system. Even a local background service running something like SVN should be awesome in relation to just a copy. Though if you also use something like Git it may start interfering with one another. I'd advise you choose one of these anyway, it's a whole lot nicer to be able to recover any version of your code at any time - even years later. And since most of these save differences only - the size is minimal. Actually, I'd advise going with this as online instead of something like OneDrive (if you're willing to share your code use something like GitHub, if not look at Bitbucket or similar). You could do it in combination, though they'd not give more security than you'd get out of a versioning system (actually a LOT less).
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Very old school here:
Robocopy: incremental copies of working files
Macrium Reflect: occasional system images
Software Zen: delete this;
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18.4.2017
I have used Acronis's True Image for regular weekly backup of my HDD's, and use xcopy/robocopy for backups of fast changing data to an USB Drive.
Since I also use Thunderbird and Firefox I use Mozbackup (Well, I wrote a bash that does it all automatically) to backup emails etc twice a day....that was a real saver when I deleted a large chunk of my current emails.
Hope this helps.
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I have used SyncBackFree for years for file backup and never had a problem with back or recovery. The paid version can do versioning of backups. I use EaseUS TodoBackup Free for disk imaging--it's remarkably quick (but I have not tested recovery, probably like most folks).
NTI BackupEZ came with a soap-on-a-rope Toshiba USB drive and I used that for almost a year. It was slow-w-w-w and never ran without errors when doing file/directory backup. It was horrible to uninstall. CCleaner, IObit Uninstaller & Control Panel could not uninstall it. I was able to download a MS tool to expunge it. You have been warned.
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Imaging: Macrium Reflect is my preference for Imaging. Also allows for incremental and other options.
VMWare: Robocopy only to an 8TB external drive.
Code: Network storage, and above drive. Far quicker.
I used to use Cobian Backup for a lot of stuff. It allows for zip or direct copies. Looks like the author has sold it however.
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I used Cobian for years to backup to external drives that I would rotate through. It does direct copy, which is nice for retrieval and compatibility, but was slow doing full backup sets.
I've since switched to CrashPlan about a year ago. I use CrashPlan for both cloud backup and local backup. While initial cloud backup can take a while, it's much faster afterwards, and also keeps file history so you can get old versions of files easily. The same software for online backup is also used for local backup to a NAS drive (mirrored) for the "golden 3-2-1" backup rule. (3 backup copies of data, 2 onsite and 1 off-site).
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