My backup strategy: FolderShare, Retrospect, and a PC in NY.

Omar’s been futzing with different backup strategies lately, so I’ll share mine. My solution is based around a few requirements:

• Not a subscription – no more monthly/annual fees.
• Distributed geographically – California has earthquakes.
• Provides incremental backups.
• I don’t have to do anything. It just works.

I’ve been using my solution since November 2004 and it’s worked out pretty well. This is basically how it works:

1. My important documents, photos, and music files are synced via FolderShare (P2P) between my desktop computer at work, my laptop, my desktop computer at home, and a $150 machine I bought from ebay in my parent’s basement in Long Island, NY. FolderShare is frickin’ awesome – whenever you add/change/delete a file, it automatically replicates it to all the other machines.
2. The PC in my parent’s basement performs an incremental backup to itself 4 days a day using an old copy of Retrospect that I bought.

That’s it!

Here’s a gratuitous diagram that shows FolderShare at work (red dotted lines):

Why the PC in NY? Well, obviously there’s the geo-thing: what are the chances of an earthquake leveling California and a hurricane that destroys NY in the same week? Also, FolderShare is so efficient that if you make some changes to a file that you didn’t intend – it replicates the those changes to all your other machines. With the PC in NY, I can revert to a version of the file from earlier in the day.

My fiancee and I share a FolderShare library as well, and that’s also shared to the PC in NY so it also gets backed up. Basically, anything that I want backed up is shared with this PC.

Aside from backups, the PC in NY is actually useful for work purposes from time to time as it’s not behind any proxies. Earlier this year, I needed to check a file that was on our website, but we weren’t sure if our proxies were caching it – so I RDP’ed into my PC in NY and checked it out. (And sure enough, it was a proxy problem.)

Finally, I get free monitoring – the other day my dad called me because the PC in NY’s hard drive didn’t make any noise at 11pm like it usually does. It turns out that it had gotten stuck rebooting due to some automatic update. One hard reset later, it was back to normal.

Well, there you have it – my backup strategy.