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For those that aren’t familiar, FreeNAS is the basis for a larger enterprise-based NAS offering sold by iXsystems. I settled on FreeNAS as it had the best combination or community support, functionality, and ease of getting started. I evaluated three different solutions for the NAS: This would likely mean that in the event of hardware failure, I’d have to purchase another Drobo to be able to read the data off of my disks. Also, I wasn’t comfortable with the fact that it ran a proprietary RAID/filesystem on the disks. Originally, I had intended to use a Drobo for this, but it proved too limiting (limited ecosystem of 3rd party plug-ins you could run). My NASĪh, the part that I’m most proud of. Thankfully, with ZFS-based snapshots on my NAS (more on that in a minute), if it does occur I can roll-back the volume to a state without corruption and hopefully resume backups. This seems to occur for some people with decent frequency. Nothing special here–it’s been pretty solid except for one case where I had to rebuild the Time Machine volume. Since I run OSX, I’m utilizing Time Machine backups to a network volume hosted on my NAS.

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When I’m done with my edits, the working copies from the laptop are deleted to free up space and I remain with the NAS-based copies. I will usually start out with working copies on my laptop that are then rsync’ed to the NAS and periodically updated. The bulk of my media files (if not all) mainly reside on my NAS. Dropbox provides an extra copy (3 if it has been rsync’ed, 2 if it hasn’t yet). So now I am up to 2 copies of data that I control (Laptop and NAS). Any file in my home folder on my laptop (Dropbox included) get rsync’ed periodically to my NAS.

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However, being an IT professional I highly value my data and still feel the need to exercise control over it. Also, as a non-paying customer, I really have no recourse against Dropbox in the event there were to be an issue with their service.ĭon’t get me wrong–Dropbox is a valuable service that is very useful for a lot of people (myself included). Why? Keeping two years worth of data (current year and previous) forces me remain within the free tier of Dropbox. However, I’m mindful to only keep about two years' worth of working documents on Dropbox. For these files, I am comfortable using Dropbox as the primary location on my laptop. Also, it is handy to be able to access them remotely. For these, I use Time Machine to the NAS.

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Full system backups of my workstations.

When done, they are moved to my NAS (more on that later). When working on these, they are on my laptop. These tend to be large and don’t change as frequently.

I will store the current year and 1-2 years' of previous documents in Dropbox.

Working documents that change frequently.

Keeping the above in mind, it’s helpful to categorize your data.

Have a plan in place for what to do in case one of your copies fails and needs to be rebuilt.

Maintain at least 3 copies of data (two copies on-site, one copy offsite).

There are three guiding principles to my backup strategy: My approach embraces standards, minimizes cost, and allows me to retain control over my data (for the most part). Also, with the proliferation of different cloud services for different needs (Dropbox for files, Evernote for notes, etc.), you can easily end up with your data scattered to the wind. I’ve seen formats get abandoned and leading vendors' products languish over time. While it would be easy to stick it in the cloud using something like Dropbox or Google Drive, I’ve been around long enough to know that there is still value in having data in a location that you truly have control over. Having been working in IT almost all of my adult life, I have come to appreciate the importance of a solid backup and recovery strategy.

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