Nobody likes backing up, but one day it'll save your bacon. Here are the seven most efficient methods of protecting your data, no matter what your situation.
Strategy 3: Back up the whole family on your home network
Good for: Your documents (including your recent documents), application data, and media files
Frequency: Daily
Recovery features: Versioning (which is switched off by default) but no full-system restore
Automatic off-site storage: No
Getting yourself in the backup habit is hard enough. Getting your family on board is nearly impossible. So why not set up a single centralised backup for everyone in the group?
If you connect several computers to one another and to the internet through a router, buy a network-attached storage (NAS) drive - a box containing one or more hard drives that you plug into your router via ethernet. Anyone on the network who has the right permission can access those hard drives.
Besides performing large-scale backups, NAS drives can store photo, video, and music files, and you can access that content even from outside your network. (If you store media files on a NAS drive, you must back those up; see Strategies 4 and 7.) Many NAS drives also work as print servers, giving connected PCs easy access to any network printer.
Most NAS drives come with software for backing up. Every PC on the network has instant access to a huge drive that can hold vast video files or anything else. And the drive is always on and always attached, so backups can run automatically.
I recommend the Synology DS209j for home use because of its powerful yet easy-to-use data-backup program. The DS209j as an empty unit (that you add your own drives to) costs about £149. The two-bay DS209j supports RAID 0 (for striping data across two drives) and RAID 1 (for mirroring, preferred for data preservation) configurations.
Higher-end NAS devices - for example, the Seagate Black Armor NAS 440, the Synology DS509, and the Western Digital ShareSpace - have four drive bays, possess even greater storage capacities, and support RAID 5 for disk parity.
These devices scatter and replicate data across the four disks in such a way that, if a drive fails, the data on that drive can be rebuilt based on the data replicated elsewhere.
Once the hardware is up and running, use software included on the CD to set up the device for your users, assigning a separate safe backup location to each. You must install the backup program, Synology Data Replicator, on every system.
On its own, Data Replicator is one of the easiest, simplest, and most sensibly designed data-backup programs I've ever worked with. Its what-to-back-up options, though few, are the right ones and are easy to understand. The software backs up files by copying them, so you don't need Data Replicator to recover a file (using it will make the recovery easier, however).
The scheduler is easy to set up and doesn't overwhelm you with options. It won't work properly if the backup drive is unavailable, but that's no problem with a NAS drive. You can use this program with a local - versus network - external drive, too, but I wouldn't try scheduling with such a setup.
By default, Data Replicator keeps only the latest version of each file; the Options box lets you turn on versioning and set how many versions to keep. A NAS drive stays on all the time, but it uses considerably less energy than a computer, so if you currently keep a PC on continuously for network access, NAS is a relatively green option.
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Comments
Bill said: agree with the comments so farI have taken a different approach under Win XP by separating my data from the system by using a second hard drive both my documents and outlook express make it simple to change the location of the store folders away from the C drive I use the Echo function in MS Synctoy to backup the contents of my data drive to a USB hard drive together with Ghost for the occasional image When things do go wrong with the system Im happy to reload XP from scratch it takes time but gets rid of the crud and the data photos and music etc are safe I wonder if this will continue to work for me with Windows 7
Luke Addison said: I had been using a Windows Home Server but had problems with it failing every now and thenIve now started running a Linux Fedora based solution at home called Amahi Its very simple very stable and runs well on an old PC I had doing nothing All my networked computers 3 attached to it are backed up dailyYou can read about it at my blog if youd like not sure if links work on here though at wwwlukeaddisoncom
Cyteck said: No where in this article has the author mentioned Disk Mirroring ie RAID 1 mode Disk mirroring ca be done in real time or synchronization can be scheduled for a specific time each day Disk Mirroring can be a really valuable option even for home used as the cost of hard disk drives has fallen so much in recent years whilst storage capacity has jumpedI have amp use a program called Mirror Folder made by Techsoftpl which provided RAID1 mode amp real time using a pair of disk drivesSEE wwwtechsoftplcom I highly recommend Mirror Folder to anyone who wants the benefits of continuous data back ups on the fly in real time Restoration of a broken mirror is pretty quick amp straight forwards too
Peter said: Nice article would also recommend that for online backup people take a look at Syncplicity which Ive used for the last 8 months or so to back up frequently changing files the free version giving 2GB of backup space Also Recently moved over to Macrium Reflect - the free version - having used Drive Image 7 for yrs Reflect is very easy to use makes fast backups and having used it recently to recover my PC system I can vouch for its effectiveness when it counts