Just wondering if anyone has any recommendations for backup solutions? I need recommendations for both a simple home backup and a more complex business backup. 

At home, I've been using Carbonite for a few years now, but over the last year, their image backup never worked and then they dropped the feature completely. 

At work, we were using Acronis for both file and image-based backups along with Google Drive to store the files (as well as taking a disk offsite in both daily and weekly configurations). However, Acronis is quite expensive for a small business and more importantly, it just doesn't seem to be reliable. We are frequently finding that the backups just haven't run on our servers or that the service is unavailable on workstations. 

As a small business, we don't have the resources to dedicate someone to look after these backups full time, so the solution needs to be largely automated. 

I use a combination of DropBox for files/Google Drive for photos and docs/GitLab for private code (since they offer free private repos)/GitHub for public code.

End result is that there is no data to backup on my local drive, because all of it lives on the cloud to start with. A couple of times a year I nuke and reinstall my OS to remove accumulated cruft, only takes about an hour to be working again from the cloud data.

7 minutes ago, swiftcoder said:

End result is that there is no data to backup on my local drive, because all of it lives on the cloud to start with. A couple of times a year I nuke and reinstall my OS to remove accumulated cruft, only takes about an hour to be working again from the cloud data.

That's cool, but it wouldn't really work for me. 

By the time we reinstall windows, connect to domain, install VS, office, local dev SQL server instances, etc, it's the better part of a day. Multiply that by 7 people and we've lost a weeks work.

3 hours ago, ChaosEngine said:

That's cool, but it wouldn't really work for me. 

By the time we reinstall windows, connect to domain, install VS, office, local dev SQL server instances, etc, it's the better part of a day. Multiply that by 7 people and we've lost a weeks work.

Generally, a backup is used for disaster recovery. If a disaster happens which causes you to restore from a backup, its going to come with costs (time) to get data back.

If you have 7 workstations, and each takes about a day to install a fresh slate, it would be worth taking the time to create an image so you can restore from a baseline workstation build. It takes 1-2 hours to rebuild from an image and you can do this in parallel instead of synchronously, so your 7 workstations are up and running again in hours instead of a full week. This is what sysadmins do in the enterprise world... I've used Acronis and Ghost Image in the past and been happy with both, but you can probably google around for your preferred imaging software tool.

1 hour ago, slayemin said:

If you have 7 workstations, and each takes about a day to install a fresh slate, it would be worth taking the time to create an image so you can restore from a baseline workstation build. It takes 1-2 hours to rebuild from an image and you can do this in parallel instead of synchronously, so your 7 workstations are up and running again in hours instead of a full week. This is what sysadmins do in the enterprise world... I've used Acronis and Ghost Image in the past and been happy with both, but you can probably google around for your preferred imaging software tool.

That's actually what we do at the moment. But we've been having serious issues with Acronis, so I was looking for alternative recommendations.

I'm using Crashplan for Business - the personal product was discontinued recently. I'll likely change soon, as the business offering is likely not the most cost effective choice. No image support though, so if you're going to insist then no dice.

6 hours ago, ChaosEngine said:

But we've been having serious issues with Acronis

Mind expanding on this? I'm also currently looking into setting up a proper backup solution.