Backups of home laptops and Network Storage

For the last couple of years we've used a pretty basic backup process for our personal laptops at home. We have a 160 GB Buffalo Linkstation and a 160 GB USB external drive for a mirror. It's not a ton of space but it's been enough for us.

We have Handy Backup running on our laptops set up to run backups each night between 2 am and 6 am. Handy Backup used to backup data and critical files from our laptops and our hosted websites. Handy Backup keeps a copy of our website files by syncing each night via FTP and also backs up data files to the NAS drive. Most backup sets keep 3-7 days of backups and are compressed using zip files. The NAS drive is mirrored to the USB Drive each night as well. This protects from a disk crash of the NAS drive. Using this process our only critical point of failure is a complete disaster where we lose all of our laptops and the drives. I plan to close this gap soon.

A few weeks ago, the NAS drive was almost full. The increased file size from Ava's camera and the Good Eat's archive we've been building from TiVO recordings started eating up space on the drive. We'd finally outgrown our 160GB drive.

It was time to get more disk space at home. So the search for a new NAS box started. I wanted to get something that had at least 500GB of storage and had protection from a disk crash. This could be a RAID box or just a straight mirror (another drive of the same size for a copy). My search led me to Windows Home Server -- yep a MS product. I wanted to discount it right away feeling that going down the route of a WHS box would be sealing our fate to always be a Windows Household. Confession Time: I still keep thinking I'll purchase a Mac and join the cool crowd. The first OEM WHS box was the HP MediaServer and there still aren't many OEM WHS boxes out yet. I spent time reading various forums (WeGotServed was a good one) and it seems that many folks are pretty jazzed about the WHS features. The number of Add-Ins for WHS continues to grow as well. The real feature that kept pulling me back to the WHS solution was the ability to add disk space as you need it -- the HP MediaServer doesn't even require a screwdriver to add space. Open the front panel, slide out the drive tray, drop in a disk, and a few clicks on the Control Panel --- Bam, more space. WHS also deals with the duplication of data across discs to reduce the risk of a single disc crash. The complete backups of Windows machines also satisfies a big requirement.

The WHS solution gives us the ability to add space later (as space gets cheaper), automates backups of our Windows laptops (we have 3 personal laptops in the house). centralizes our media (photos, videos, music), and serves up the media. I'm also interested in many of the Add-Ins that are being released.

The order has been placed (using Ava's 10% HP discount). FedEx says it will arrive on Friday. I'll post more as I get it set up. If you have a Windows Home Server and have any tips, certainly let me know about them!

Around this time I also spent a fair amount of time researching online backup solutions. After researching some of the major services - Mozy, Carbonite, and Jungle Disk (which uses Amazon S3 storage). I decided that Jungle Disk was the one to dive into further (I'll probably write more about this decision in a future post). But after the WHS decision, Jungle Disk has a bonus for me - Jungle Disk offers a solution that ties into WHS.