Cheapest way to setup home backup?

beany_bot · 6 Jan 2016 at 08:39

Hi, I am looking to have a system that backs up my 3 storage drives (1 ssd, 1 had and 1 ext hdd) and potentially my wife's laptop hdd. I don't know if it's better to have each drive just clone to a dedicated drive or shove all drive on one monster hdd? I have access to old pc's if that helps. Looking to backup about once a week. The drives in their entirety. What's the cheapest way to do this?

ant1298 · 6 Jan 2016 at 10:08

beany_bot said:
Hi, I am looking to have a system that backs up my 3 storage drives (1 ssd, 1 had and 1 ext hdd) and potentially my wife's laptop hdd. I don't know if it's better to have each drive just clone to a dedicated drive or shove all drive on one monster hdd? I have access to old pc's if that helps. Looking to backup about once a week. The drives in their entirety. What's the cheapest way to do this?

Are these drives all external or a mixture (the SSD and Had(HDD) namely)?

beany_bot · 6 Jan 2016 at 10:19

SSD internal, HDD internal, wifes laptop HDD internal, Ext Hdd external.

beany_bot · 6 Jan 2016 at 10:25

Basically my PC which has 2 HDD (windows 7 on onw and windows 10 on the other). an external Hard drive and my wifes laptop. Thats all the data points in the house. Be nice to back them up.

ant1298 · 6 Jan 2016 at 10:42

If you wanted a full clone of the drives then you could use something like Macrium reflect to backup the drive as a .img file, it will do full and differential backups in the free version.

Running this on every machine to a central storage unit (NAS) or to a plugged in HDD would work, this could be either individual or a monster HDD. You could partition the drive into the relevant sections if you used just one drive.

You'd need to buy a large enough drive though, and it'd need to be at least the size of all your drives put together to ensure you could keep at least one full copy of everything. If you wanted to keep versions then a larger drive would be in order.

For me a large enough HDD wasn't affordable, I worked out how much data I'd have in about a years time and got a drive that size, luckily that was affordable. i.e I have a storage cap of 5.44TB, but only 1.87TB used, that's taken 3 years to get so I got a 3TB HDD as by next year I can upgrade.

I can't think of a cheaper way of backing up the data. Remember that it's suggested to have an offsite copy too, although not necessary. And if you don't version you won't protect yourself from deleted files in the long run.

Anthony.

Macrium also offers a paid version that you can backup files and folders, might be another option if you didn't need to clone the OS. Software like CrashPlan offers a free backup to local HDD (int/ext), you could plug that into a machine and backup the rest via the network, or just plug into each machine when you want a backup. Crashplan will recognise the drive being plugged in a begin the backup, reducing user input.

edit: Macrium Reflect or Acronos True image could be used.

beany_bot · 6 Jan 2016 at 10:46

Ok thanks thats a great Idea. I think for safety I would put each drive on a mirror drive on the backup machine, I would have to buy 4 HDD but they would only need to be 2TB each max. so not massively expensive. Plus I can probsably rob a few old ones from work. Would I just use an old PC to house the "server"? can I do that?

darwin1859 · 6 Jan 2016 at 10:50

Might be overkill, but I'd suggest having an on-site and off-site backup. I pay $6 per month for SOS Online Backup, gives me unlimited storage.

beany_bot · 6 Jan 2016 at 10:52

darwin1859 said:
Might be overkill, but I'd suggest having an on-site and off-site backup. I pay $6 per month for SOS Online Backup, gives me unlimited storage.

I would be happy to pay that but would that not require me to upload Terabytes of data every week? My upload speeds are poor as it is.

ant1298 · 6 Jan 2016 at 10:53

beany_bot said:
Ok thanks thats a great Idea. I think for safety I would put each drive on a mirror drive on the backup machine, I would have to buy 4 HDD but they would only need to be 2TB each max. so not massively expensive. Plus I can probsably rob a few old ones from work. Would I just use an old PC to house the "server"? can I do that?

You could, set up a share for each drive and that should be enough.

Others may suggest to set up a NAS type server, but if you wanted it quick, easy and cheap, then using a windows share would work. I've personally never used this method but I can't see why it wouldn't work.

The only thing is that the drive itself wouldn't be a straight copy of the HDD it was backing up, it would contain a .img file (created by Macrium) that was a copy. You could then run the Macrium recovery disk to restore the .img. You can also browse the .img via the macrium GUI or any .img mounter.

Using Crashplan would not give you a bootable copy and you couldn't browse the data using anything but Crashplan as it''s encrypted.

ant1298 · 6 Jan 2016 at 10:55

beany_bot said:
I would be happy to pay that but would that not require me to upload Terabytes of data every week? My upload speeds are poor as it is.

Yes, but it's more for files then the whole OS. You could use Crashplan to backup to a HDD offsite, say at your parents or friends. Simple to connect, they just need to allow you to use there bandwidth and keep a HDD plugged in for you. This could be for your really valuable files.

Edit: the service will only upload the changed files, and only the bits that are changed, not the whole file. So data transmission is further reduced.

beany_bot · 6 Jan 2016 at 11:07

ant1298 said:
Yes, but it's more for files then the whole OS. You could use Crashplan to backup to a HDD offsite, say at your parents or friends. Simple to connect, they just need to allow you to use there bandwidth and keep a HDD plugged in for you. This could be for your really valuable files.

Edit: the service will only upload the changed files, and only the bits that are changed, not the whole file. So data transmission is further reduced.

I would stil have to upload 6TB in the first instance. I honestly think that would take a month at my upload speeds. As it's just for a home backup I think onsite will suffice. Hell at the moment I have nothing.

ant1298 · 6 Jan 2016 at 11:08

beany_bot said:
I would stil have to upload 6TB in the first instance. I honestly think that would take a month at my upload speeds. As it's just for a home backup I think onsite will suffice. Hell at the moment I have nothing.

Something is better then nothing. 6TB would take more the a month anyway

darwin1859 · 6 Jan 2016 at 11:29

It took me a few weeks, on and off, to upload about 4 TB. But once that's done, the upload for added or changed files won't be much. I like having piece of mind that if my house burned down, I'd still have everything.

beany_bot · 6 Jan 2016 at 11:48

darwin1859 said:
It took me a few weeks, on and off, to upload about 4 TB. But once that's done, the upload for added or changed files won't be much. I like having piece of mind that if my house burned down, I'd still have everything.

I guess it depends what you are doing and how important the data is. If my house burned down the last thing I would be thinking about would be my whether my powerdirector settings and latest skyrim save point was safe

I don't have anything business sensitive on my home PC. It's just a home PC really.

ant1298 · 6 Jan 2016 at 11:52

beany_bot said:
I guess it depends what you are doing and how important the data is. If my house burned down the last thing I would be thinking about would be my whether my powerdirector settings and latest skyrim save point was safe I don't have anything business sensitive on my home PC. It's just a home PC really.

For me it's the photos. Screw the rest.

Use something like Gamesavemanager to backup you save games somewhere safe, Dropbox. Least Skyrim is safe!

darwin1859 · 6 Jan 2016 at 12:00

ant1298 said:
For me it's the photos. Screw the rest.

Use something like Gamesavemanager to backup you save games somewhere safe, Dropbox. Least Skyrim is safe!

If you have rainforest prime you get free photo storage.

ant1298 · 6 Jan 2016 at 12:05

darwin1859 said:
If you have rainforest prime you get free photo storage.

Please enlighten me with this talk of Rainforest. Last I heard it was being madly deforested and David Attenborough was getting angry.

Edit: Just understood the hidden message!

darwin1859 · 6 Jan 2016 at 12:42

ant1298 said:
Please enlighten me with this talk of Rainforest. Last I heard it was being madly deforested and David Attenborough was getting angry.

Edit: Just understood the hidden message!

beany_bot · 6 Jan 2016 at 14:18

So lets say I get a PC and bang a couple 3TB drives in them. What next? How do i literally goabout making it a backup that backs-up say once a week any changes made to any drives on the network?

ant1298 · 6 Jan 2016 at 14:36

beany_bot said:
So lets say I get a PC and bang a couple 3TB drives in them. What next? How do i literally goabout making it a backup that backs-up say once a week any changes made to any drives on the network?

You need to enable them in network shares so they can be seen on the network. This should be as simple and right click, sharing.

Go to the machine that you want to backup, run the software your using (Macrium Reflect) and set up a definition file (GUI will help) and leave it alone. You'll need to do this on each machine. EDIT: point the backup to the network share.

It should then be fully automated after.

That's how I would do it.