Retired, so no need for work/personal separation, but I never did it before, but made sure that my company knew any work I did at home was going onto my general tape backups and was not going to be deleted any time soon after I left the company.
Nowadays: most important stuff, rsync.net, more than a bit expensive at 20 cents/GB/month, but their many other virtues and especially simplicity make up for it, including support of private git repoes. currently $9.60/month, that's a grandfathered price in that now the minimum you start with is larger.
Saved my email repository and a fair amount else when the Joplin 2011 tornado trashed the machine that it was on as well as my BackupPC discs which were in another room that suffered the only wall breach (my main system came through fine, and that near miss of losing everything else prompted me to start using tape again, LTO-4 was capacious and cheap enough by then, I'd long outgrown DAT).
Most of most important stuff with BackupPC to a 1GB USB 3.0 drive (would be all to a bigger drive, and will be when the next item changes state, but I'm economizing now).
Since my 2 2TB bulk drives are all over 5 years old now, they're getting nightly rsynced to a new 4 TB drive on my other system, which when one of them fails will physically replace both of them.
Backstopping all of that, a LTO-4 tape drive on my other system, tar incrementals every night, those tapes cycled every week from a pool of 5, then full backups every month, which are put off-site sometime during the month.
Now that I've got a serious Internet connection, if I was starting over, and didn't have the sunk costs of the LTO-4 tape drive system (drive, SAS controller, fast disk to feed it) and plenty of tapes, I'd probably do this level of backup to the cloud at a fairly raw level to S3, Glacier, GCS, or Backblaze.
> Now that I've got a serious Internet connection, if I was starting over, and didn't have the sunk costs of the LTO-4 tape drive system (drive, SAS controller, fast disk to feed it) and plenty of tapes, I'd probably do this level of backup to the cloud at a fairly raw level to S3, Glacier, GCS, or Backblaze.
Personal warning to anyone else attempting to create a multi-drive setup with Backblaze. Backblaze deletes external drive backups if you don't sync them every 30 days [1]. I've lodged frustrated complaints with them over data loss but that is their current policy.
Errr, I mean their new low cost raw storage B2 Cloud Storage (now 0.001 cent/month more than Glacier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13010949), not their total solutions for those not wanting to go to that sort of trouble/complexity/whatever.
(As someone who's been using tape drive backups since 1978, DECtape to start with, fortunately before I learned the -rf flags for rm ^_^, I'm not a conventional user.)
Nowadays: most important stuff, rsync.net, more than a bit expensive at 20 cents/GB/month, but their many other virtues and especially simplicity make up for it, including support of private git repoes. currently $9.60/month, that's a grandfathered price in that now the minimum you start with is larger.
Saved my email repository and a fair amount else when the Joplin 2011 tornado trashed the machine that it was on as well as my BackupPC discs which were in another room that suffered the only wall breach (my main system came through fine, and that near miss of losing everything else prompted me to start using tape again, LTO-4 was capacious and cheap enough by then, I'd long outgrown DAT).
Most of most important stuff with BackupPC to a 1GB USB 3.0 drive (would be all to a bigger drive, and will be when the next item changes state, but I'm economizing now).
Since my 2 2TB bulk drives are all over 5 years old now, they're getting nightly rsynced to a new 4 TB drive on my other system, which when one of them fails will physically replace both of them.
Backstopping all of that, a LTO-4 tape drive on my other system, tar incrementals every night, those tapes cycled every week from a pool of 5, then full backups every month, which are put off-site sometime during the month.
Now that I've got a serious Internet connection, if I was starting over, and didn't have the sunk costs of the LTO-4 tape drive system (drive, SAS controller, fast disk to feed it) and plenty of tapes, I'd probably do this level of backup to the cloud at a fairly raw level to S3, Glacier, GCS, or Backblaze.