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Larry Browning
01-16-2009, 2:17 PM
One of my new years resolutions is to get my home network more organized and running smoothly. As a part of that I want to develop rock solid, yet simple, backup and restore procedures. I have 2 computers on my network and a NAS unit. The backup software that came with the NAS is called NTI Shadow. It seems to have 3 backup modes. 1) drive image backup, 2) realtime mirroring and 3) file/folder backup. The only thing that seems to work OK is the real time. Anyway, I am pretty unhappy with it, so much so that I have not set it up except for the realtime mirrioring on only one of my computers. I have been in search of someting better for about 2 weeks now and am getting discouraged. So far I have been limiting my search to free/open source type programs, mostly because management(SWMBO) has given me a VERY limited budget. If I have to buy something, I will have to buy 2 licences which doubles the asking price.
I have found a very good Drive Image backup called Macium Reflect. NTI took 15 hours to backup my C drive! Macium Reflect tool a little less than 2, plus it saved it in a single file rather than about 20.
Anyway, I haven't nailed down all my requirements for file/folder backup but here is the basic list:
1) It MUST be set it up and forget it. So a strong scheduler, that can run in the background is necessary.
2) It needs to have a simple yet flexible interface. Very intuitive, because I won't be messing with it very often and will forget how it works. The last thing I need when I and trying to recover from a disaster is to have to figure out how the backup software works.
3) I think I want it to be able to compress files in a standard compression format, so that if necessary I can restore file without having the backup program installed. While at the same time I want to be able to restore using the backup software for accidently deleted of corrupted files

The best one I have found so far is COMODO backup, but the compressed backup file is limited to 2Gig, and it has a pretty awkward interface.
I tried Corbin backup, but I really had a hard time defining which files I wanted to backup and it has no restore feature built into the program. I have looked a several others, but nothing seems to satisfy me so far. I thnk I am now ready to try out some of the comercial products and I am looking for a few recommendations from my friends here at SMC.

Also, if you would share your own backup stradigies with me I would appreciate that as well.
Oh yeah, if your stradigy is like my current one (no backup at all) you don't need to share that one with me, I already know about it!

Sorry for the long post.

Dave Haughs
01-16-2009, 2:55 PM
Here is my strategy, it may or may not be what you are looking for but I am heavy into photography and the thought of losing my images frightens me. So this is the low budget setup I put together:

I have one computer that is my main computer that everything is stored on that I care about. I have others and you could easily implement them into this system by sharing the backup drives.

I have an external drive I keep at home at all times. Once I have a computer up and running I make an image of it so I don't have to start over. The images are stored on the external drive.

EVERY night I have a program called SyncBack (it's free) that runs and syncs all the changes made to my data files (data, music, video, photos...) on my computer to those stored on the external drive.

I have another external drive that I keep locked in a cabinet at work. I take it home once a week and manually click the run button on SyncBack to run the profile that updates it. This drive stores the same data as the external drive at home but protects me if my house burns down or one external drive crashes (I figure I am willing to play the odds that both external drives won't fail at the same time).

It's not perfect but it works for me. The biggest flaw is if I corrupt a file on my computer and it syncs that night then the backup of that file is trash too, but as long as I notice that before I do my weekly offsite sync I am ok. But one file down is better than multiple files lost. Tape backup is still a great way to do it but it is expensive. External drives are cheap and redily availible.

I also do not compress because drive space is cheap. I have about 100gig of photos alone.

Stephen Massman
01-16-2009, 3:03 PM
I work at a university as a windows server admin. So I understand all of what you want to accomplish.

I use Acronis TrueImage at home to image my main computer to a second internal drive and then copy the files to my Netgear ReadyNAS for second and final storage.

I am also a big fan of Microsoft's powertoy robocopy. Which is what we use at work for our main scripted backups of files and folders. It is mainly command line base but there is a gui for it but I havent used it. We mainly setup robocopy in a batch file and then schedule it in "Scheduled tasks" and then just let it do its thing.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2006.11.utilityspotlight.aspx



Hope that helps.

JohnT Fitzgerald
01-16-2009, 3:07 PM
I use almost the exact same method, except I don't make a copy to take offsite (yet).

I have a hard drive in my office desktop. It is shared on my home network for all systems (desktop, my wife's laptop, and the kids'). That is where I keep all documents, pictures, etc. I don't backup email though (yet). I have a Maxtor OneTouch unit connected to the desktop, and it automatically every night makes a backup of the shared drive (which is just documents, pics , etc - no system/Windows files). It supposedly allows me to restore an older version in case of a file corruption, but I've never tried it.

My next step is to make use of one of the online backup services (Mozy - which we can get free from work, or Carbonite, etc) but I haven't decided which one. Having the files (especially important documents and family pictures) on multiple spinning disks protects me from a HW failure. But I really need to get a copy offsite to protect against "local disasters".

Stephen Massman
01-16-2009, 3:11 PM
Good process and I have worked with that program and found it to be a good one.

You could add some more days in if you have the space on the external drive. It would increase the number scheduled tasks but it would give you the ability to go back in time and get files past your current one day. You could do something similar on your offsite drive where you have week1 and week2 folders.
Like this
Mon -> Day1 folder
Tue -> Day2 folder
Wed -> Day3 folder
Thur -> Day 4 and so on

Either way you have a good setup.



Here is my strategy, it may or may not be what you are looking for but I am heavy into photography and the thought of losing my images frightens me. So this is the low budget setup I put together:

I have one computer that is my main computer that everything is stored on that I care about. I have others and you could easily implement them into this system by sharing the backup drives.

I have an external drive I keep at home at all times. Once I have a computer up and running I make an image of it so I don't have to start over. The images are stored on the external drive.

EVERY night I have a program called SyncBack (it's free) that runs and syncs all the changes made to my data files (data, music, video, photos...) on my computer to those stored on the external drive.

I have another external drive that I keep locked in a cabinet at work. I take it home once a week and manually click the run button on SyncBack to run the profile that updates it. This drive stores the same data as the external drive at home but protects me if my house burns down or one external drive crashes (I figure I am willing to play the odds that both external drives won't fail at the same time).

It's not perfect but it works for me. The biggest flaw is if I corrupt a file on my computer and it syncs that night then the backup of that file is trash too, but as long as I notice that before I do my weekly offsite sync I am ok. But one file down is better than multiple files lost. Tape backup is still a great way to do it but it is expensive. External drives are cheap and redily availible.

I also do not compress because drive space is cheap. I have about 100gig of photos alone.

Eric DeSilva
01-16-2009, 3:13 PM
I use Acronis TrueImage at home to image my main computer...

I'm interested in following this one, since I should really back things up better...

Maybe you can answer a question that has been plaguing me... I've generally used a 1TB RAID 5 NAS to store data; its actually mirrored on another RAID 5 NAS at a separate location. Those are both Buffalo Terastations, but I keep running out of space (wife is a photographer and I've got a huge digital music library ripped to Apple Lossless). Long story short, I just got in a ReadyNAS Pro w/6TB that I plan on running in RAID 6.

If I image the hard drive in my main computer to the ReadyNAS and then the hard drive fails horribly, can the same TrueImage software write the image back to a fresh drive (presumably using another computer), and then that re-imaged drive swapped back into the main computer? Last time the working computer crashed, I didn't lose any data--all on the NAS--but reinstalling Windows, Office, and Adobe Master Suite took forever. Hoping to avoid that if things go bad again... Does it make any difference if the main computer drive has been partitioned into several drives?

Stephen Massman
01-16-2009, 3:21 PM
TrueImage allows you do recover all of windows back to a new drive. So if your hard drive failed in the computer you imaged with trueimage you would be saved by storing them a different storage. Trueimage has a boot cd that has network drivers. So in the machine with the failed drive. pull the bad one and put in a new hard drive and boot from trueimage cd. It will get dhcp and then you can connect to your backup drive and load the image to the new drive and even grow if the new drive is larger. the software doesnt care about partitions but does allow to backup just one partition, mulitple or the whole drive.


You wouldnt loose anything since the last image and not have to reload windows or any apps.

Hope that helps

Eric DeSilva
01-16-2009, 3:24 PM
Hope that helps

Perfect. Just wanted to make sure image backup was what I thought it was...

Larry, pardon the side track there.

Jeff Wright
01-16-2009, 8:18 PM
I have been very pleased with a product called Carbonite, made by the folks who developed the WinZip compression software MANY years ago. You stuff is uploaded to a secure site and does your entire hard drive (and anything else you tell it to backup). You need not monitor it; it backs up any file that is new or revised automatically in the background. I do not detect any slowing in computer speed with it running. Check it out here:

http://carbonite.com/aff/cj/lp1.aspx?cmpid=BA_CJAFF_1_LP1

Mike Conley
01-16-2009, 9:20 PM
I have been very pleased with a product called Carbonite, made by the folks who developed the WinZip compression software MANY years ago. You stuff is uploaded to a secure site and does your entire hard drive (and anything else you tell it to backup). You need not monitor it; it backs up any file that is new or revised automatically in the background. I do not detect any slowing in computer speed with it running. Check it out here:

http://carbonite.com/aff/cj/lp1.aspx?cmpid=BA_CJAFF_1_LP1

Another vote for Carbonite!!!

Anthony Scira
01-16-2009, 11:21 PM
Unless you have a secure offsite backup you really don't have a backup.

I use Jungle Disk and Amazon Web Services. Its pretty dirt cheap. Plus it lets me access my files from anywhere vs carbonite I think requires a program.

15 cents a month per gigabyte storage.
10 cents per gigabyte upload
17 cents per gigabyte download.

My bill is around 3.50 a month, talk about cheap insurance !

Paul Simmel
01-17-2009, 12:04 AM
I Use Acronis True Image to make complete images of my whole system. The Image goes to a 2nd hdd inside the box. I alternate between the on board backup hdd, and a Western Digital 360 PassPort.

You can also get USB > SATA (or IDE) cables for regular sized hdd's so you can have a clone of the main drive sitting in your drawer (I do). But the PassPorts are cheap, and I plan on picking up more of them as time and $$ permit.

Data is data, and it is easy to backup. These days you need to Restore your whole system. Depending on which Acronis you use, it can allso have the capability of Restoring the Image to different hardware.