Scheduling back-ups on home PC - what software?

[Mars]

I have two nvme 500GB SSDs on my motherboard in RAID0 which I use for the OS and my installed apps, plus a 2TB SATA SSD for data. I also have two 2TB conventional HDDs I'd like to use to back-up the OS/apps and data drives (one to each).

The OS/apps back-up needs to be able to restore back to the RAID array. The data drive only needs to be a copy and I could manually fail that back if needed.

What are the options for both software and the way to handle this? I don't think the OS/apps drive needs backing up very often - maybe overnight only or even weekly. Not much will change on that drive after my initial installation but I do want the back-up to be "restorable". Is the answer to this simply to use the MS back-up option?

The data drive... I have too much data to consider backing it all up on-line. I already push all my photos to Google, and I use the free 15GB Google Drive for critical stuff but for the rest of my data, is there a way that whenever anything changes on my SSD data drive, it is instantly replicated to the back-up drive - the same way as when you make changes to your local copy of Google Drive?

Thanks for advice.

[xeny]

Mars said:

is there a way that whenever anything changes on my SSD data drive, it is instantly replicated to the back-up drive

If you're doing anything that really stretches the SSD, it's probably unrealistic to expect replication to a mechanical drive to keep up.

I'd consider a robocopy script, either run as a scheduled task, or I'd consider a script that runs on PC shutdown to update the backup - see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12434863/execu...

Don't consider this remotely sufficient backup -something like cryptolocker will cheerfully encrypt the backup as it is visible to Windows all the time.

[paulrockliffe]

Why don't you setup your second 500Gb drive as a Parity drive on the RAID array? That will protect you from a HDD failure on the OS, though I've only used that sort of RAID setup on a server so I don't know the ins and outs where the OS is being protected by the pariy drive too.

Your second request isn't necessarily straightforward - if you have immediate backup, that means that although you'll stay up to date on the backup, if a file corrupts or is deleted, it'll be mirrored to the backup before you realise. I think RAID is probably the right place for that sort of protection rather than backup, then scheduled backups and retention to cover the longer term.

I've used Cobian Backup to create regular backups, but now I use Google Drive and the roll-back feature to backup my important stuff, it's £1.50 a month for 100Gb.

But I have all my documents accessed via a server anyway, I use UnRaid on a HP Microserver using RAID to protect against HDD failure, there's 6Tb there protected with a Parity drive. Perhaps that's the way to go? I've not noticed any performance issues connecting to the server over a Gigabit network connection, but there's probably sync software you can use to drag a copy of whatever you're working on to local storage and then keep the server updated while you work on it which would get you around that.

[Mars]

The OS drive will be for performance. If it breaks, there's nothing else on there that I can't recover from a back-up or, worst case, reinstall from original media/download again.

The data drive needs constant replication.

[Chainsaw Rebuild]

I use Backblaze. It copies your data to the cloud and is constantly looking for new files to update. I have had it for years, it is unobtrusive and you don't realise its running.

Though the initial backup takes awhile of course.