Backup Solutions

[iluvsheep]

Like others before me, I too would like to mend my ways and setup a real backup solution. For this purpose, I've requisitioned a NAS that will soon have RAID-5. Now, I just need a way of getting the data from my computer to it.

Things I'd like:

• Backup the whole hard drive (perhaps with folder exclusion), ideally also the windows registry and

Comments

[bennj]

I made a really stupid unrelated comment on Lori's entry on this subject, so I feel like you need a really stupid unrelated comment here too. Have you considered punchcards?

[istar]

Why encrypt transmission, unless you're planning on sending your backups over a public network?

[camlost]

I assume this is a coolness factor issue.

[iluvsheep]

I'm actually planning on storing the NAS somewhere else (not at my house). That way if something happens to my house (robbery, fire, etc.), I'll still have a backup elsewhere.

I haven't worked out the details yet, and I might very well not need secure transmission (for example, if got a VPN working). We'll see.

[mbrubeck]

Since you're planning to do this remotely anyways, did you consider using a hosted service like Jungle Disk? It meets all of your criteria except it's not free. Depending on how much data you have, the cost of Jungle Disk (monthly charge of $2 + $0.15/GB) might be more or less than the cost of buying and maintaining your own storage device.

My personal experience is very Linux-biased and maybe not very useful for Windows, but anyways:

I'm currently using the open-source Duplicity to do encrypted, incremental, versioned backups to my own servers and to Amazon S3. It's a Unixy command-line tool (can be used under Cygwin on Windows) and you'd need to use something like cron to set it up as a fire-and-forget job. As with many encrypted backup formats, it's possible but not exactly easy to access individual files in the backup. (You can list files and restore individual files from the command line.)

I've also used rsnapshot which is very similar except it doesn't do encryption and doesn't support S3 (but does make it easy to access

[camlost]

I've been really happy with my Synology NAS (it was the only company that I read about that had decent reviews), but they're fairly pricy. There is some backup software included, but I recall not being terribly happy with it. We maybe will someday getting around to setting up our pictures with SVN on the Synology drive (it runs Linux).

Maybe I'll look into CrashPlan too.