Cheapest way to setup home backup?

[beany_bot]

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?

 

[beany_bot]

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

 

[beany_bot]

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.

 

[beany_bot]

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?

 

[beany_bot]

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.

 

[beany_bot]

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.

 

[beany_bot]

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.

 

[beany_bot]

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?