Parent (i.e. Idiot) Friendly Basic Backup

Skeeter

Skeeter

Skeeter

Caporegime
Joined
8 Mar 2007
Posts
37,146
Location
Surrey
What would be the simplest and easiest way of setting up some simple backup of my parents documents incase their HDD fails or their PC goes pop?

I'm thinking either a mirrored RAID setup, or just a simple second HDD and some scheduled nightly backups using SyncToy or similar. I've never really bothered with RAID. If a HDD fails in a mirrored RAID setup, would my non computer savvy parents be able to just carry on regardless, or would they need to go into the BIOS and fiddle with RAID settings (which they won't do, and I'm not going to want to try to talk them through over the phone).

Using SyncToy to a USB HDD means that if the system drive fails they can just plug it into a laptop and carry on working until I visit next and reinstall Windows, etc.

Any other suggestions? What are online storage providers like? What do other people do? It was fine when I was living at home as we just used my WHS, but having just spent an hour talking my mum through removing a HDD and connecting it up with an IDE/USB cable, I'd rather not have to do that again :)
 
If you mainly care about data security, rather than system downtime, then mirroring drives is a waste of time. Mirrored drives aren’t a replacement for backups, so you’re going to need to backup anyway.

Assuming the amount of data isn't silly, and there's enough upstream bandwidth available, then a cloud solution would make sense. You could probably even configure things so that you get the notification emails and will know that the backups are still working.

If the amount of data is fairly small you could probably do it FOC (2GB of storage FOC with MozyHome for example).
 
Yeah, its documents mainly. She has been using a PC with a 40GB HDD for 10 years and hasn't ever filled it.

There are pictures and things too though, so 2GB might not be enough. What is out there in terms of online backups? I can't say I have ever really looked.

I'm thinking the easiest way is just a USB drive and a nightly backup of everyones documents folders. Shame that the recent HDD price jump has made external drives stupid expensive.
 
Setup something like SpiderOak :)
Little application that runs in the background and syncs away to their online servers nicely, with 5gb free space if you lookup the right coupon code.
Incremental backups too, so you can restore any version you care to.

-Leezer-
 
In terms of simplicity, Western Digital have little drives available that have their own backup software, but you still have to remember to connect the USB cable and run the backup. You still aren't covered if someone stole your equipment or it was lost in a flood or fire.

Other online solutions are:

CrashPlan.com
Mozy.co.uk

but you may have to contend with a slow upload time and there's the cost factor too.

Rgds
 
Hmm. A 32GB stick would probably do fine, and there a lot cheaper than USB HDDs.

Whats the best tool for local backup syncing? I've used SyncToy before, any other good ones?

Actually, just had a though, can you turn an FTP share into a mapped drive? I have an FTP server on my WHS so they could just run a nightly backup to that using something like SyncToy? I'm not worried about speed as its going to be a few documents a night at most. Its an off site backup for them that then also benefits from the redundancy I have built into my server. Basically host my own remote backup solution?
 
Last edited:
CrashPlan looks quite clever.

I could set my server as a destination and set my parents PC and my sisters laptop as sources and destinations and then let them backup across each other with no added involvement from me...

Only issue I see is someone suddenly dumping 30GBs of photos or something into their documents and my internet being screwed over.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom