How do you recommend backing up your data?

[toolazytosearchitmyself]

I have roughly 2TB of data to back up. Right now some of it is on an encrypted secondary SSD in my laptop and some of it is on an external hard disk drive. I want to keep all the data in one place and don't want to risk losing any of it.

I don't want to install a new, bigger secondary SSD into my laptop because it's old and I have a new laptop which only has enough physical space for one m2 drive. Installing a higher capacity m2 drive is an option but would make reformatting more complicated and choosing the wrong options when reformatting will mean losing my data. I'm reluctant go use an online solution either because this data includes warez and sensitive information like passport scans and passwords.

 

[The Catboy]

It depends on what you got. For my MacBooks, I use Time Machine and an external drive set up to back up every couple of hours. For Linux, I use either the Timeshift backup tool for Linux Mint or Déjà Dup for other distros. I believe Windows has a feature for automatic backups. I would recommend an external or a dedicated drive, but that's just my setup.

 

[gdavies]

Personally I use a QNAP box with a dedicated hard drive for all my systems, and then cobalt to provide a shadow copy, having written this I have probably dammed myself to a failure but so far not had any problems, but time machine is a good shout too

 

[larskixr]

Regardless of which method you choose, it is important to make sure that you are backing up your data regularly to ensure that you have a copy in case of data loss. It is also a good idea to periodically test your backups to make sure that they are working as expected.

 

[aquova]

For your use, an external drive might be best, at least if it's data you don't really plan on using very often.

I have a home server with larger drives in it that I backup my data to. Some stuff I just manually copy things over via a network share, but for some of my more active folders, I have them locally sync to it via Syncthing. The server then is configured to do regular snapshots, and is set up with RAID to hopefully prevent data loss (all with ZFS).