What is a good backup strategy for home?

I recommend a NAS drive for your home network and setting up network shares for each user to backup (manually or scheduled).

Free backup software at various levels of sophistication is available in abundance (if you buy a NAS drive, such software is usually included).

If you buy a pair of NAS drives, you can easily keep them synchronised as an additional safety layer. In addition you may archive really important data (e.g. photos, videos) on DVDs. or on Cranberry DiamonDisc (the 1000 tear DVD :)

And don't forget, whatever you use, MAKE SURE THAT YOU CAN RECOVER THE DATA.

This does not mean check that a back up file is created - it means actually restoring the data to another machine and then using it.

Don't keep the backup on the same machine you are backing up?

...

ehh, for home use, if there isn't that much, I would recommend using a service such as Dropbox or Mesh.

If however you have a lot of stuff, get an external hard drive.

Windows backup is very good and you can take an entire image of your machine and store it on the drive.

If however, you just want to do file level backups, take a look at Fbackup... a client of mine uses this and loves it - personally, I just like doing it manually.

Just remember to do it regularly.

If however you have a hell of a lot of stuff, you may want to take a look at getting a NAS and bunging in a few hard drives and then centrally backing up all computers to that.

For my Macs and PCs I use Time Machine/Time Capsule, NTBackup on a schedule.

In general, I'd recommend that which involves as little thought and hassle as possible. I have an old cheap USB 2.0 hard drive that I use to copy the contents of my TimeCapsule to (the amount of data is small enough for now) and bring it to the office every Monday or so... I have offsite backups that cost (almost) nothing... I believe that for non-commercical use something like this is quite adequate.

I assume you are thinking principally of backing up your personal files, not your operating system, etc.

A solution that has worked very well for me is to install a simple network-attached RAID. I have a NetGear NAS DUO and make sure that MyDocs for all machines points to folders there. Files that I really want to keep on local machines can be backed up by this box automatically - I do this for my Outlook mail folders.

This particular box has a lot of features, but the ones that I like best for file security are:

• RAID 0. Duh, RAID 1 - mirrored disks. All files are automatically kept in duplicate on separate drives in the NAS
• Backup functionality
• Off-site backup. When I feel the need for an off-site backup, I just swap out one of the drives. The drives are hot-swappable and synchronise automatically. The drives themselves do not have to be exact-matched pairs.

Once you are up and running, you can pretty much forget about it.

This NAS has a lot of other features, but these are main ones for me for file security.