Backups and tools
Let's review how I handle my backups and how I save my data. I'm primarily a Windows user, so most of these tools are designed to be used in a Windows environment, but some are also cross-platform.
A basic tool in place to cover my documents, images, music and similar is Microsoft's OneDrive. It's cross-platform, runs quietly in the background and keeps a copy of everything in the cloud. It works nicely enough and lets me access many of my files remotely on demand, which has proven useful multiple times. But, and this is a big but, OneDrive is not a backup system. It's local + cloud storage, which can replicate your content on multiple devices, but it synchronizes automatically – if you accidentally delete or overwrite something, it's going to do the same on the cloud copy. You need something else to accompany it.
That's where FreeFileSync steps in. This piece of software is designed to sync content from one source to the other, and I trigger it manually once in a while. One major benefit of using it instead of copying entire folders manually is that it only adds, updates and deletes what needs to be, so it's much faster. You can save a set of rules to apply, so you can save individual sources with their own parameters. One of these rules copies the content of my OneDrive folder in a separate directory so I have a version that doesn't risk blowing up if the platform fails or I make an error.
Another one in the toolbox is Duplicati. It's set to make daily backups of some folders, notably the metadata of my Plex server. It can do incremental backups along with keeping set periods (like, say, the last 3 days, a week ago and a month ago), giving me the opportunity to roll back at various points in time in case something gets corrupted.
Finally, there's StableBit DrivePool. I have a storage array in a few hard drives outside of my main computer where the heavier content gets stored (videos, backups, endless Minecraft world saves...). I have it set to automatically store all the content on at least two different drives of the array. This way, if one hard drive fails, I have a good copy on a second one. I picked this option instead of a traditional RAID array as the files can be directly accessed on each drive as needed – no need to wait for the array to rebuild itself when adding or removing drives, it can be instantly accessed.
How effective is all this? You never really know until you need it, of course. Coincidentally, the secondary hard drive on my desktop computer died some weeks ago and I haven't lost anything important, nor have felt the urge to replace it. So far, so good!
– Doctacosa