Scattered Home Backups
Posted on July 6, 2007
6 Comments
I spent some time today ensuring that all of my home machines are being backed up to another home machine for a bit of redundancy. I’ve been a bit too casual with the home stuff lately — and considering that most of my gear is someone else’s trash or “upgrade left-overs” that’s just no good.
In the event that this might help or inspire someone, here’s where I’m at now.
My Machine
My desktop is probably the most backed-up of the lot. It’s also the destination for some other machines.
To start with, I have a set of data being backed up by Mozy (aff. link). I’ve been very pleased with how that has been working. I’ve been using it for almost a year now with no stunning disasters. That runs several times a day just grabbing updates and changed files.
Mozy starts at a 2GB free account. Via referrals I’m up to around 10GB.
I’m also a Windows OneCare user. Among other things, it offers a backup solution, so I use it to backup a lot more data to an attached USB2 hard drive. It is scheduled to run once a week.
My machine has a (to me) large 400GB drive that’s mostly empty. Today it became part of the backup strategy for the other machines.
Wife’s Machine
With OneCare, I get licenses for 3 machines and this machine has the 2nd license. There are a decade’s worth of digital pictures on it and I’m rather amazed we haven’t lost many over the years. Up until now, my backups for have it been a bit ad-hoc and sporadic.
Via OneCare, all those images, the family Quicken data and her My Documents contents are all backed up to my 400GB drive once a week.
I’ve not done it yet, but I think I’ll install Mozy on her machine tomorrow to get an extra offsite backup of those pictures…
Son’s Machine
This one is pretty easy, there’s not much going on outside of a browser. However, he does have some school work and personal stuff, so he has my 3rd OneCare license. It backs up to my large drive every 2 weeks.
Daughter’s Machine
Out of OneCare licenses, so I fell back to my tried and true Scheduled SyncToy solution. It grabs her My Docs folder (which is stunningly huge) and syncs it to my large drive once a week. That’ll catch her pile of digital pictures, unfiled music and 8 or 9 years of various school papers and such.
Long Term
What I really want to do is get a Windows Home Server box built and get all the machine backups centralized to it. I’ve played with the beta a bit and liked what I saw — I think this product will be a boon for situations like this.
I have an older box ready to go with everything I need except for some large drives. I want to start with a pair of large and mirrored drives. I toyed with moving my desktop’s 400GB drive over, but it’s SATA and I don’t yet have a SATA card in this older box. That, and it seems silly to have a dedicated backup machine that’s not mirrored.
So, that’s a future project. I’ll eventually toss some funding towards this little project, but it’s not quite bubbled up to the top of the “things to spend money on to play with” list yet. 
Tags: backup, mozy, onecare, Windows-Home-Server
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6 Responses to “Scattered Home Backups”
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My folks recently had a fire. Most things were saved, but it really made me think: it’s worth keeping back-ups in more places than just at home, right? I mean it would be terrible to have your house destroyed for so many reasons, but worst if you lost all sorts of data with that too.
@Urbanist - Yikes!
Excellent point. That’s why I’m a large fan of online backup services.
Is it possible to point OneCare to recognize files being backed-up by Mozy?
Just wondering if I can turn the yellow oval into a green one.
Bridget, that sure would be nice, wouldn’t it?