I work in construction. Due to the number of documents generated in the process, i had to comply with rigid ISO standards. I thought: why not do the same at home?
Disclaimer: I'm an architectural engineer, not a network architect. This is a synthesis of ISO standards for information management, adapted from practice. I lost enough files to learn how to build a redundant architecture.
This is the result. Done in Affinity.
Found an interesting review while browsing the Apple appstore.
This is for the app "Clone"
User says app doesn't completely close, but I'm using this software and I know how good this app is.
It actually has a complete closing button (terminate).
As this is a continuous real time back up app, app needs to be running at all times.
Quit was hiding the app to the macOS menu bar to prevent accidental data corruption while backing up the files.
Funny to see the rating given as well, just because user didn't read the user manual given in the app.
But still who reads the user manuals these days huh? 😅
User asked to put a "Close" button, as I know apple doesn't allow to use that word in their apps.
Do you think user was correct to be mad about this or over-reacted because of lack of knowledge? or something else?
https://apps.apple.com/app/clone-sync-folders-backup/id6754220372?mt=12
I’ve been a loyal Acronis customer for many years. It has saved my bacon a couple times and the support I’ve received was excellent.
I renewed in January (Acronis True Image Premium with 1tb Cloud). I paid over 200.00. What gall’s me is the 1tb limit on a $200 subscription price tag. Hell even apple storage is cheap in comparison.
Are there consumer alternative options for Win 11 recommendations?
Hi everyone,
I’m a wedding videographer and I’ve recently bought my first NAS, but I’m trying to make sure I set everything up properly before I fully rely on it.
Current setup:
Before getting the NAS, my workflow was very simple:
Now that I’ve got the NAS, I’m trying to figure out the best setup for both backup and editing.
My main questions are:
1. What RAID should I actually be using?
I currently have 4x8TB drives in RAID 5, giving me around 24TB usable. I understand RAID is not a backup, but I’m wondering if RAID 5 is sensible for my use case, or if I should be using RAID 6 / RAID 10 instead. Since I’m dealing with paid client work, reliability matters, but I also need decent speed and usable storage.
2. What should my actual backup strategy be?
I want wedding projects to be double or ideally triple backed up. With my current drives, would a good setup be:
Or should the NAS be the main storage and the PC/external drives be the backups?
3. Is editing directly from the NAS realistic?
I currently edit from a normal internal 10TB HDD in my PC with no major issues. Would editing directly from the NAS over network be faster, slower, or roughly the same?
The NAS has 4 HDDs in RAID 5 and a 1TB M.2 SSD cache. I’m not sure how much the SSD cache actually helps for large video editing files.
4. Why am I only getting around 110MB/s transfer speeds?
When transferring files to the NAS or to my external HDD, I’m maxing out around 110MB/s. It took around 15 hours to back up 4TB, which was painful.
I assume this is probably because something in the chain is running at 1GbE, but I’m not sure. My NAS has 10GbE, and I have a 10Gb network card in my PC, but I’m clearly not getting 10Gb speeds at the moment.
What should I be checking? Cables, switch, network adapter settings, NAS port, SMB settings, drive bottlenecks, etc?
5. Would I be better using SSDs in my PC for active projects?
I’m wondering if the smarter workflow would be to buy a few 4TB SSDs, or one large 8TB M.2 SSD for my PC, and use that for active editing, then back everything up to the NAS and external drives.
For example:
Would this be better than editing directly from the NAS?
6. Should I upgrade the NAS cache?
The NAS currently has a 1TB M.2 SSD cache. Would bigger SSD cache actually improve video editing performance, or is cache mostly irrelevant for large sequential video files?
Would I be better spending money on SSDs in my PC instead?
7. How should I handle remote editor access?
Eventually I’d like my editor to be able to access project files directly from the NAS, edit them, and upload finished projects back.
I’m not sure if this is realistic because of upload/download speeds, VPN speed, security, and project file sizes.
Would the better workflow be:
Or can remote editing directly from a NAS actually work well?
8. What would be the cleanest, fastest, safest workflow?
Basically, I’m looking for advice on the best practical setup for a wedding videographer who needs:
I’m happy to buy more storage if needed, such as internal SSDs, bigger NAS cache, cloud backup, or another external drive, but I don’t want to waste money on the wrong thing.
Any advice on how you’d structure this setup would be massively appreciated.
Thanks.
Does anyone have an opinion on HDP PC Agent f/k/a Netbak PC Agent? I currently use Acronis to backup my PC and several laptops to a QNAP NAS and am interested in exploring an alternative. I do regularly scheduled incremental backups. I appreciate the ability to do a bare metal restore. I also want to be able to restore via wifi (yes, I know this is not ideal).
A bit of context, in the past I was burned by a bad USB cable causing my image backups to be corrupted. Since then I've turned on the "auto verify image" setting in Macrium Reflect 8, which has saved me from keeping corrupted backups for multiple reasons by notifying me when a backup has failed because of the corruption. I do one full image backup at the start of the month, then every week do one differential backup that deletes the previous differential backup (so, one full + one most recent differential).
Recently, I've wanted to move away from Macrium as I've been having some weirdness happen with it, but I also just want to use something that gets updated and doesn't require a subscription. A big requirement for the alternative is that it has something similar to Macrium's file verification step.
I've looked into Veeam Agent (and used it in the past) but I'm still unsure how it's "health check" image verification works (the documentation, while thorough, confused me a bit lol). It does sound like it doesn't work with full backups though, which I'm not a fan of, and I'd also like it to check the file right after creation, instead of on a schedule. With Macrium, when any backup file is created and finished, it will then (with the setting on) read back the backup file in it's entirety to make sure there is no corruption. If it fails, it will send a windows notification saying as much. It doubles the backup time but I think it's well worth it, and would love for the alternative to have something similar where every backup file is checked for corruption, after the file has been created (so not on a schedule).
TLDR, I want a backup program other than Macrium that can do full and incremental image backups, that also verifies every backup file that was created after a backup has no corruption.
I went from backing up to the cloud to backing up to local harddrives. I have 2x 10TB drives (USB), and 2x smaller 2TB drives (USB). For whatever reason I decided to backup the same thing to all 4 drives. It's less than 2TB so it fits all drives. For the 10TB drives, I just do another copy.
All of this takes an exceptionally long time. Upwards of several days to just backup 1TB. So my question for the experts here is:
Any ideas/thoughts are much appreciated!
Hi everyone,
I hope this is okay to post here. I’m not selling anything — I built a small free Windows tool and would appreciate feedback from people who regularly copy, sync or compare larger folders.
Required info:
The tool is a GUI for Robocopy called RoboSync Manager. The idea is to make Robocopy a bit easier to use without hiding what it actually does.
It includes source/destination selection, compare mode, live output, command preview and HTML reports. It also supports local folders and network shares.
GitHub:
https://github.com/waltrone1/waltrone1-robosync-manager
I would really appreciate honest feedback, especially from people who already use Robocopy, FreeFileSync, SyncBack, TeraCopy or similar tools.
Would this be useful, or is there something important missing?
So I understand the 3-2-1 rule and the need for offsite and offline backups – however, I don't understand why most seem to suggest that for the average user the offsite backup typically is the offline backup, ie secondary backup, and not the primary one?
We're currently implementing a setup where the primary backup is a NAS placed in a family home far away (connected via tailscale), and the secondary backup is a cheap convential HDD lying around ('in cold storage') somewhere in our home and only connected periodically for manual backups.
Why wouldn't this be the most time- and cost-efficient setup for the average user?
(Additional context: The data we're talking about is primarily ~4 TB of family photos, I'm aware the considerations change based on the exact use case)
Hi,
I am looking for an incremental backup software for Windows 11.
A readable file backup, stored in the data in its original format rather than hidden inside proprietary encrypted databases.
So, I can open my files without the need for specific backup software to perform a restore.
I’m looking for software or a monitoring setup that gives me oversight across multiple data sources and backup targets, for example:
• folders on different linux hosts
• LXC containers and VM data
• ZFS datasets and snapshot growth
• restic repositories
• backups to cloud (e.g. pcloud)
What I’m looking for is something that can answer questions like:
• When was the last successful backup per source?
• Are snapshots or restic repos growing abnormally?
• Are any backup targets close to capacity?
• Is a given dataset covered by at least one backup job?
I know several tools that can monitor pieces of this. But given the importance of the 3-2-1 approach I was wondering if there is a more integrated solution or approach, especially for homelab or small self-hosted environments.
Do you use an existing tool for this, or did you build your own check scripts? I’d be interested in practical setups, especially ones that produce alerts rather than just nice graphs.
I have several cloud storage accounts. Right now, each cloud has its own script, tool, or some kind of workaround. So, technically, backups exist, but managing them is messy and annoying.
I’d like to bring all of this into one normal panel or interface, where I can set up the schedule, choose folders, connect different cloud accounts, and then simply check that all backup jobs are running as they should.
After weird occurrences with Dropbox (one morning 1/3 of my business and personal data were erased, gone forever) I had it and switched to sync.com - Canada-based, similar privacy protection as the EU, zero knowledge etc.
The Mac client switch to v2xx was mostly a downgrade: no more easy indicator if the app was indexing or syncing, no more "remaining files/time" indicator etc.
Then came client DT versions with unpublished issues with some legacy OS versions, which took a week and a CS escalation to resolve them.
Now I get a flood of File Conflicts which (with an identical workflow) I never experienced before, "Details to Resolve" messages with helpful hints written for Windows, and "Unauthorised Device" errors coming out of nowhere and for no reason at all.
As a paying subscriber for 10 years or so, I've had it with Sync. Not quite sure yet where to, but time to move on for sure.
I'm no CS so forgive me. But, it seems that it would be better to backup your files to a public immutable ledger than to some private cloud company. Write once read many MAY be used by cloud companies, but if they can delete the data, what is the point? Also, yes, I get the 3-2-1 rule. The point is why use cloud instead of a public immutable ledger?
A fast, ultra-secure, cross-platform desktop backup tool with content-addressable storage and automatic deduplication.
100% Free and Open-Source!
https://github.com/LeonardoCiaccio/Vorn
I'm a web developer, mostly JS and PHP, about 4 years of experience. A while ago I helped a friend set up the infrastructure for his small IT company and ended up managing the backups there too.
The issue was simple: two servers, and I wanted to manage backups from one place. Backrest was the closest thing I found but it's single-machine, so you get one interface per server. The commercial alternatives felt like overkill. Also, they use Zitadel for SSO on all their internal tools, so OIDC support was a requirement from the start. And since they're working toward ISO 27001, having centralized, auditable backup management wasn't just nice to have.
I didn't find anything that fit, so I built Arkeep.
It's a backup manager with a server/agent model, built on Restic and Rclone. You run one server, deploy agents on the machines you want to back up, and manage everything from a single web UI. Agents connect to the server over gRPC so no ports need to be open on the agent side. It handles Docker volume discovery, pre/post hooks, and streams metrics back in real time.
One thing I want to be upfront about: Go was completely new to me. I had a client that required Go for some backend work, so I used Arkeep as a way to learn the language while building something I actually needed. I used AI a lot to get through it faster. The architecture and the decisions behind it are mine, but I didn't write idiomatic Go from scratch. I know this community has strong opinions on AI-assisted projects right now, so I'd rather say it clearly.
It's been running as a secondary backup system for about a month without issues. Still beta, still rough in places.
What works:
- Server + agent architecture, agents connect out (no open ports needed)
- Restic under the hood, Rclone for destinations Restic doesn't support natively
- Docker volume auto-discovery
- OIDC support
- PWA web UI
- Helm chart (needs more real-world testing)
- SQLite by default, PostgreSQL available
What's missing or not great yet:
- No VM support yet, it's planned
- Dashboard is minimal
- It's beta, bugs are expected
Repo: https://github.com/arkeep-io/arkeep
If you try it, feedback is very welcome. That's really why I'm posting.
Following the 3-2-1 backup method, I want to backup my keepass file to a cloud service. The problem is, if I lost my two local copies of my keepass file, how would I log into my account with my cloud provider (assuming the password is kept in my password manager)?
I thought the solution would be to have a strong, but memorable master password for my cloud account, so I could access my cloud backup even if I had lost the local backups of my database, however most cloud services require 2fA, and even if 2fA is switched off, they will send a code to the account's email, and If I do not have access to that email due to not having access to my password manager, you guessed it, I'm locked out of my cloud backup.
Can anyone help me think up a solution here?
Hi, long time lurker here !
On monday i started a new job and installed Obsidian on my work computer and synced my vault without issue with Obsidian Sync. Then, to secure it i tried to backup the vault with my company's OneDrive only for the content of the vault to just disappear during OneDrive's backup.
No biggie i say to myself, i'll just boot up my personal computer when i'll come back today and copy the vault from there. Exept i'm an idiot and i launched Obsidian first and now the vault got synced with the empty one from my work computer...
Now i can't find a way to restore anything from One Drive and when i try to use Obsidian's File Recovery plug in, i can only restore the latest file out of a hundred. File Recovery doesn't seem to see the others.
Do you guys have any advice on how to recover the files ?
I just started managing a small business and discovered our "backup" is just a single 4TB external drive that stays plugged into the main office Mac.
We aren't really IT smart, but I would like to know what should we do if that drive fails. What's the standard "easy" setup that's also not going to cost thousands in managed data backup and recovery services?
Hey, I want to know what's the best way to backup folders and files, I want it efficient and less cost? We're 5 or 6 people in our company that needs Backup. So any Idea's?
