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Question regarding Backup Software

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eRaz0r

New Around Here
Firstly, let me say I'm a big fan of this site. The articles have been incredibly helpful. This is my first post in the forums.

Having read "Smart SOHOS don't do RAID", and a bunch of other useful stuff, I sat down and really thought about what I need.

While I might consider a NAS file-server + second NAS for backup in the longer term, I have to face the fact that I have a house full of laptops and desktops that have no backup strategy at all. (Yes, I know.. but I'm here, aren't I? Got to start sometime).

Therefore the primary purpose of any NAS I might buy will be to backup many gigs of data for my family.

So, given that, I need something that I can attach to the wireless network and schedule backups without needing my family to "do" anything. Something that works regardless of whether they install software on their machines or not.

After reading the articles on this site, I'm now less concerned with the NAS's performance (primarily, the network will be the limiting factor ).

What concerns me now, is the quality of the Backup Software. A year or so ago I got one of those WD external USB "Book" drives and I found Memeo to be intrusive, feature-starved, and when the "trial" ended, I was "locked out" of my backups. I would ideally like something that is free or, at least, comes pre-installed on the NAS and is not client, or time-limited. Ease of Use is another big factor. I can get around a linux command prompt if I absolutely have to, but I'd prefer something my wife could use.

Are there any knowledgable folks here who recommend something like that?

Thanks in advance
 
There's plenty of us here to help. A few questions:

1) How many PC's to backup?
2) Which OS is on each PC?
3) How any PC's wired versus wireless?
4) Will anyone need the ability to backup while out of the house/LAN? (Does anyone spend time away from the home/LAN?)
5) Are you only looking to backup critical, non replaceable data, such as My Docs, Pics, Music, etc? Or, would you like a disaster recovery solution that will allow you to rebuild a harddisk from an image file and have a PC back in business within an hour? Or, both?

BTW, congrats to you for realizing its time to backup before disaster strikes.
 
1) How many PC's to backup?
5 or 6 laptops, 3 desktops. Can't remember the exact storage capacities in each right now.
2) Which OS is on each PC?
All Windows right now. 1 WinXP, the rest are Vista, IIRC.
3) How any PC's wired versus wireless?
All wireless. I rent, so no ability to wire the house. Cable goes to an old Linksys WRT54G. I imagine I'll place the NAS on a wired link to it just to ensure a stable connection. I plan on upgrading this to a gigabit N Router sometime soon, with the WRT on a sub-net for older -G clients.

4) Will anyone need the ability to backup while out of the house/LAN? (Does anyone spend time away from the home/LAN?)
Not enough for this to be an issue. Mostly the machines are at home.

5) Are you only looking to backup critical, non replaceable data, such as My Docs, Pics, Music, etc? Or, would you like a disaster recovery solution that will allow you to rebuild a harddisk from an image file and have a PC back in business within an hour? Or, both?

I have not really thought about it. My first inclination is just to backup important data. I tend to look upon hard-drive failure as an opportunity to eliminate cruft from a system through a nice brand-spanking new system install :) OTOH, the option not to do so would be useful.
 
I dont see the point of backing up data on a bunch of PCs if you have a NAS. The best value of the NAS is actually to streamline all that.

I would instead change the workflow. Keep some of that data in the cloud eg Gmail or online backup services. The media such as music and video should be on the NAS ie at one single location. And then you back up the folders on the NAS itself - to an external hard drive/s or again to cloud.

But this whole thing of backing up data all over many PCs sounds like paving the cowpath to me.
 
I dont see the point of backing up data on a bunch of PCs if you have a NAS. The best value of the NAS is actually to streamline all that.

I would instead change the workflow. Keep some of that data in the cloud eg Gmail or online backup services. The media such as music and video should be on the NAS ie at one single location. And then you back up the folders on the NAS itself - to an external hard drive/s or again to cloud.

But this whole thing of backing up data all over many PCs sounds like paving the cowpath to me.

Your recommendation makes a lot of sense. Just beware that if any of these notebook PC's is taken out of the house and a user wants access to their ITunes, etc., they won't be happy. Same holds true for any folder you move the target to the NAS for centralized storage.

Some NAS models, such as the Readynas series have a Remote option that allows users to access their folders from outside the LAN, provided they have an internet connection. Unfortunately Internet connections are not available everywhere and inevitably you'll be in a pinch one day with no internet available.

This is where local storage and backup/sync to the NAS works best for some home users.

I do agree with using cloud based email such as Gmail or your own domain through Godaddy, etc. And if you use an email client like Outlook, definitely get an IMAP email account this way all folders sync between the cloud and Outlook. Gmail offers IMAP for free, Godaddy domains (for example) can have IMAP and unlimited storage for $30/yr for up to 10 accounts.

More on the cloud storage front, I really like Jungledisk. For $2/mo you can install Jungledisk on all your PC's ($2 for all, not $2/PC) and keep cloud backups of your most important data. Jungledisk also charges $0.15/GB for monthly storage. So, say you store 20 GB of data on Jungldisk, you'll pay them $3/mo for storage. Pretty cheap! Jungledisk also supports Delta copying which means if you have large files/databases such as Outlook, Jungledisk will analyze the changes you made, upload the changed bits only and reassemble the file on the server side. This is a beautiful feature!! The pain with cloud backup is the time it takes to upload the initial backup set. it can take days in some cases to backup each PC. Once the initial backup is done, subsequent backups will run MUCH faster since only changes are uploaded.

I don't think I'd recommend you use cloud backup for your media files simply because of the storage requirement. You could, but use caution.
 
1) How many PC's to backup?
5 or 6 laptops, 3 desktops. Can't remember the exact storage capacities in each right now.
2) Which OS is on each PC?
All Windows right now. 1 WinXP, the rest are Vista, IIRC.
3) How any PC's wired versus wireless?
All wireless. I rent, so no ability to wire the house. Cable goes to an old Linksys WRT54G. I imagine I'll place the NAS on a wired link to it just to ensure a stable connection. I plan on upgrading this to a gigabit N Router sometime soon, with the WRT on a sub-net for older -G clients.

4) Will anyone need the ability to backup while out of the house/LAN? (Does anyone spend time away from the home/LAN?)
Not enough for this to be an issue. Mostly the machines are at home.

5) Are you only looking to backup critical, non replaceable data, such as My Docs, Pics, Music, etc? Or, would you like a disaster recovery solution that will allow you to rebuild a harddisk from an image file and have a PC back in business within an hour? Or, both?

I have not really thought about it. My first inclination is just to backup important data. I tend to look upon hard-drive failure as an opportunity to eliminate cruft from a system through a nice brand-spanking new system install :) OTOH, the option not to do so would be useful.

What is the up/down speed of your Internet connection?

Please take the time to review each of your notebooks to determine the approximate amount of data you are looking to backup. Let us know.
 
I dont see the point of backing up data on a bunch of PCs if you have a NAS. The best value of the NAS is actually to streamline all that.

I would instead change the workflow. Keep some of that data in the cloud eg Gmail or online backup services. The media such as music and video should be on the NAS ie at one single location. And then you back up the folders on the NAS itself - to an external hard drive/s or again to cloud.

But this whole thing of backing up data all over many PCs sounds like paving the cowpath to me.

Well I would like to move to a combined solution, where there's a central server as well as a backup. The key for me, right now, though, is data protection without requiring my kids or my wife to actually have to do anything different. The last thing I want to hear is "My laptop is dead, and I forgot to put my pictures on the NAS, Dad"
 
What is the up/down speed of your Internet connection?

Please take the time to review each of your notebooks to determine the approximate amount of data you are looking to backup. Let us know.

Using http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest from my laptop I get 1.5 to 2 mbps up and 4.5 to 10 mbps down.

Of course, that's over the wireless-g network, so I could run the test over Cat-5 directly through the router if you want that info.

A quick sum of capacities : 3 laptops with 80gig drives + 1 x 222gig (nearly full). + 1 x 300 gig + 1 desktop with 450 gig + 1 desktop with 500 gig, and the last desktop will be upgraded in the near future to 500 gig.

Total capacity is around 2.2TB, although we're probably not even half that right now. With hard-drives being somewhat cheap / gig these days, it's likely this capacity will grow.
 
First, its impractical to backup even 1TB of data to cloud storage. Your ISP will probably can your account during the month you decide to do the initial uploading. Plus @ 1.5Mb/s it could take a week or more of continuous uploading to put 1TB of data on the Jungledisk servers. And, you'd be paying $150/mo for storage. Not sensible for home use.

For cloud storage you should segregate the data that is irreplaceable. Maybe your My Docs, Pictures, Outlook data, etc. Uploading movies, music, and other media to cloud storage is a waste. Also, uploading OS and application files is a waste. Only your critical data that cannot be recreated should be uploaded to a cloud IMO.

If you've already got 1TB of data to backup (assuming that's data and not including Windows, Office, etc. files) you will likely want to get a NAS that can support 2 x 2TB drives at minimum. It may make sense for you to consider a 4 disk NAS as this will give you the ability to create larger volumes or multiple volumes.

Some NAS units come with backup software, but most included apps are limited. FYI, they won't backup "in use/locked" files. I.E if your Outlook is open, they cannot backup your Outlook database until you close Outlook.

You can find better support in many 3rd party backup apps. Many can be configured to run automatically on a schedule or based on predefined events.

I like Syncback Pro as its very flexible and reliable. On the other hand some users find it too confusing to use. You can download a trial and see if you like it. The nice thing is that the developer permits up to 3 installs from one license (provided all 3 are the same owner). http://www.2brightsparks.com/

You can also look at Genie Soft backup Pro. Its OK in my book (recent updates have improved quality). One of the nice features of this program is that if a job is scheduled to run where the destination is a network share, and the job runs when the share in unavailable, it will offer the option to wait on the network share to become available instead of throwing error messages like most backup programs. It can also auto resume backup to a network share in the event the backup is in progress and one of your users decides to take the PC away from the LAN. I'm sure other programs offer the same feature, but I don't know of any off hand. http://www.genie-soft.com/

Another option is to use Norton Ghost 14 or better yet Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery Desktop Edition 8.5. Both offer full disk imaging and file based backup. However, BESR's main advantage is that you can do a bare metal restore to new hardware (very handy when the system failure is not disk related). Both Ghost and BESR will allow you (the manager) to monitor and control jobs on other PC's in your LAN. Its a handy little tool. Also, both offer file based backup as well, however note that neither copy the files in their native format to the destination. For some idiotic reason Symantec decided to copy the files in a proprietary format and you are forced to use their recovery viewer to retrieve files. This works fine, however I would WAY prefer they allow storage of files to be untouched and in their original format (or simply zipped). http://www.symantec.com/index.jsp (if you want BESR desktop, PC Mall sells individual licenses for a reasonable price)

A competitor to Ghost/BESR is Acronis TrueImage. I used to like TrueImage but the later versions have had problems. Plus Acronis is adding useless features and now TI is bloated and cumbersome. TI also offers both Imaging and file backup and if I recall correctly, TI will allow file backup to remain in the native format. if you opt for TI, make sure it works in your setup. You may be better off opting for the TI Workstation edition (for business) as its more reliable IMO. http://www.acronis.com/

one last thing, your Vista PC's may have a good backup option built-in. Vista Business and Ultimate include both a file backup and disk imaging utility. Home Premium has a file backup only. The Vista utils work and can be scheduled although Microsoft doesn't make it extremely easy. Best part is that they are free and already there depending on your Vista edition. See here for more details: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2007.09.backup.aspx

There's many other options I can suggest, but the above are established and with good support.
 
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