4) What’s Your Favorite Backup Software?

You know, I’m convinced, when it comes to backup software, the fewer steps, the better. If I don’t have to plug in an outboard hard-drive and click on a backup program, I confess: my computer gets backed up about 20 times as often now that I’ve hooked up to an online backup, as opposed to the outboard (hardware) type drive I used for years. I’m sure there are people with great memories. I’m not one of them. I love a “fire and forget” solution. Greg our I.T. guy, recommended Spideroak for me.

https://spideroak.com/download/referral/d6161fb65def625c27d24480e82cd647

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He said lots of other agencies were using it these days. He said that it [also] was an end-to-end encryption solution (like Podio), in which the company’s employees can’t read my data while they’re there, sitting in front of the server farm, baton-twirling an ink pen while they click the button on the end. You might prefer a different solution though. You could try one of these two…

http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm

http://www.crashplan.com/

But what’s YOUR favorite back-up software? How do YOU avoid disaster? Please jot a note in the Comment box below this items as it’s displayed on the Brigada web page. We appreciate your input!

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7 Comments

Ian Benson on 2012/12/07 at 6:16 am

I use MyBook Live which backs up the entire contents of two computers. It can also be accesses remotely but I do not use that function.

Chris on 2012/12/07 at 2:41 pm

I’ve had several bad experiences with dedicated backup software–cases where I could not restore my backup! So I no longer like using solutions that encrypt or compress my files. Instead I like to synchronize my files in their native format.

My favorite solution right now is to store all my data in Dropbox. Not only are my files backed up in the cloud, but I have a backup of all my data on all my computers and can access all my data from anyone’s device.

Before Dropbox, I used a free version of Syncback to synchronize the data on all the computers in our house to a NAS drive and a USB drive to store offsite. Syncback runs on demand or can be automated.

I obviously don’t worry much about security. Sure, some dude at Dropbox can read my stuff. If he uses my data, I imagine Dropbox has deep pockets.

K on 2012/12/10 at 6:08 am

Whew. SpiderOak has seemed SLOW to me. MANY MONTHS, only a fraction my hard drive backed up. The 100-GB increments are inflexible, too. I’ll keep the experiment going, but I sure hope the backup finishes before my computer crashes…

Editor on 2012/12/16 at 5:48 pm

Hmmmm… It seemed slow on mine as well, but it only took about 7 days to back up everything. Now, I never notice it. Maybe you’ve got more data! :-)
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Peter on 2012/12/10 at 5:04 pm

I tried spideroak a couple years ago and had all kinds of technical problems (freezing up). Eventually dumped it.

Since then I put half my important stuff on dropbox and half my important stuff on google drive (I’m cheap and don’t want to pay an annual fee).

Then I use syncbackSE to do an FTP backup on a nightly basis to my web-host (they offered over a hundred gigs free with my standard account and I only use a small portion of that for my web stuff). I also have an external that I syncbackSE to periodically as a 2nd level backup.

Steve on 2012/12/17 at 7:28 am

Not sure how it compares to others, but since its not been mentioned, thought I would put it on here. Carbonite is an online backup service…. has served me well. Speed seems okay, price is decent.