Backup Help

[Woblee]

I'm after a bit of advice on the whole data backup front. I've got a 2Tb drive at home with all the usual stuff (music/photo/docs) and would like to protect it against hardware failure.

In the past I've had a few external harddrives and just plugged 2 in and used synctoy to do a mirror image of the original, but I'm after something a little easier than having to faff about with 2 drives (each with it's own power supply).

Would this be any good? Set it up as Raid1 so at least I'm covered for a drive going pop.

Or maybe go with 2 of these? Least they are USB powered so just plug both straight in and mirror one to the other


Budget wise I want to stay under £250 if I possibly can.

 

[RobertP]

For a fit and forget solution I'd say a microserver and windows home server is hard to beat.

Mine backs up my PC, my new ultrabook and my wifes laptop every day without us even knowing that it is happening. It also serves music, pictures and videos etc. when required. Whenever I remember I backup the server and take the backup to my daughters place as an off site copy.

A couple of weeks ago I changed the hard drive in my wifes laptop for a larger and faster one. To test the server I used it to restore the laptop. You make a bootable usb key from the server to do a restore. I had to initialise the disk myself (using the restore software) and had to find a driver for the network adaptor but apart from that it just did it all automatically. Drive had a lot on it so it took 3 hours on gigabit ethernet but worked perfectly.

 

[Woblee]

Thanks for the reply Robert. I think a home server may be a bit overkill as I don't need half the features it'll offer me. There's only my laptop to worry about and I'm after somewhere safe to save the data once the laptop starts getting full, it'd be more like every fortnight/month it'd be getting used.