Re: Backup for Home PC and Laptop

As I've noted before I have a Windows Home Server. It does scheduled
backups of my environment & can use Wake-On-LAN to wake up sleeping PCs if
you want the backups to run overnight. It does data deduplication so no
file (or version thereof) is stored on the server more than once regardless
of how many client machines have it or how many subdirectories have copies
(really reduces disk space needed for backups). Daily backup takes just a
few minutes/machine. I've got it set so I can restore from any backup from
the past 90 days but that parm can be tuned to your liking.

It also helps when doing HD upgrades. Just do a manual backup if you've
changed anything since the last daily, swap drives, boot the recovery CD,
and about 4 clicks later it's restoring your system. Recovery takes 20
minutes to 4 hours depending on how much data you've got and the speed of
your home network and that's recovering to a fully usable system; you don't
have to reinstall the OS and then a backup app or connect to any outside
service.

You can also access shared WHS directories from the 'net via a free
SSL-secured site and RDP from the 'net to your machines to provide remote
access.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx

You can buy just the software & build your own box or buy a pre-built system
with a TB hard drive for about $350.

What it does not give you is off-site storage. However, you can plug in a
USB drive to the home server and back it up to that and then take that drive
off-site.

On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 11:35 AM, David Gibbs <david@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

One thing to consider about using a cloud based backup system ... how easy
is it going to be to recover your machine if the hard drive goes casters up?

I've had a number of hard drives fail at work ... while recovering the data
from a cloud based backup is fine ... I doubt it's going to be feasible to
backup the entire system to the cloud.

At work I backup my workstation to a 500gb USB hard drive ... it's saved my
butt on more than one occasion.

If I didn't have a local backup, I would have had to ... 1) Get a new hard
drive, 2) Reinstall the OS, 3) Update the OS, 4) Remember & find all the
software I had installed, 5) Reinstall all the software, 6) Update all the
software, 7) Recover my data. Based on my recent migration to a new machine
at work, I would estimate it to take about 2-3 days to have basic
functionality back ... 5-6 days to be back where I was before the failure.

With a local backup all I had to do was 1) Get a new hard drive, 2) Boot
the recovery CD, 3) Restore the machine to the last backup (usually less
than 6 hours old). Based on experience, this takes about 3-4 hours max
(assuming there's a long line at Frys).

I would suggest using a local backup for hardware failure protection ...
because you're going to be able to restore the system pretty quickly.

For data protection, use a solid & reputable cloud backup system.

For security purposes ... I would also suggest you consider encrypting your
data before backing it up to a cloud based service.

Perhaps use truecrypt to for the data ... use the mounted truecrypt volume
for the data ... and backup the truecrypt container file to the cloud.

david

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