I’m looking for a backup solution for my wife’s work laptop (W7). Her important files are already backed up regularly as they are shared with her staff via dropbox pro.
I would like to be able to do backups for her system and other files that aren’t shared however. I’ve never really set up something like this as I just use RAID arrays at home.
I was thinking something like a 1TB external and some type of software to perform differential backups on a regular basis? Would also be open to paying for something hosted but haven’t found something that I don’t think will be too expensive. I’d estimate she has about 100-200GB of data that I’d like to BU.
The only hesitance I have with hosted is things like the outlook.pst file that are huge, and change all the time. If its constantly backing that file up its going to hog bandwidth like its no ones business. Would be easier to do locally. All of her actual client data is already doing that via dropbox, I’m mostly just worried about the OS / email if she drops it in a puddle or something.
LZ - You suggesting I set up a server, and work off that?
We’ve started playing with this in the office and I’m very impressed if you’ve got multiple computers on your home network you want to backup.
For a single station it’s probably cheaper to pick up a removable drive with enough capacity and backup software to automate the backup. I use Backup Exec System Recovery by Symantec here at work. My desktop died a few months ago and I just dropped a new one in, popped in the recovery disk, and was right back to the night before a couple hours later. It even restored my OS onto different hardware, since the replacement box was a bit newer. We did have to call MS to have them re-authorize my windows key for the new hardware.
Hrm, interesting. Will have to look in to it. Only two (three if you count the extra laptop) computers in her office right now, may be worth it though. I wonder if its just cheaper to change to use that as a file server as well, although we do like having access to the files from anywhere, I guess I could set up a VPN or something like that to access files remotely? I would think if I did that, I’d want the server to have a RAID array at least no? No sense having two single point failures.
Yeah, you’re sort opening a can of worms here. However, I can say that I would not trust Dropbox with my business files. A little investment can go a long way. Just make sure it’s manageable. Set it and forget systems still need to be regularly updated and maintained at some level. Even if it’s just a few hours per month.
We’ve been very happy with dropbox, we aren’t using the free version. It also provides lots of great options for sharing individual files or directories with clients as well.