Backing up

The recent crisis with megan's laptop has prompted me to consider getting a decent back-up regime going here at home.

In my view the basic requirement is that the backing up process needs to occur automatically.  As we all know, no one ever backs up.  Well they may do once or twice but to be sure they do not do it regularly.

So today I wandered down to Office Works to see what they had on offer.

One option was a Seagate Black Armor NAS110 for $199 including some version of Acronis backup software.
I was tempted.  Single box ready to go solution.  Somewhat concerned that if it does not do wat I need then I would be stuck.  Also concerned because they seem to have locked it up physically and so if the internal had disk were to die then it could be hard to replace.

Decided instead to purchase a 3" external USB hard disk 2TB for $128.

At home, pressed an old desk top carcas into action.  It has XP on it and a small hard disk of its own but only 2GB of free space.  Good enough for a start.

Plugged on the new external USB disk.
Downloaded the free version of syncback from http://www.2brightsparks.com
Loaded it.

Set Megans's C drive to shared.
Observed the clock on the new desktop was wrong and that it would not sync with a internet time server.  Gave up and set the time manually.
Enetered a "profile" to back up Megan's entire C drive.  Set it running.

Set my "my documents" to shared and I am about to go and see if I can get it to back up mine as well.

Need to work out a way to put passwords onto the shares I create so that when Megan takes her computer elswhere and hooks onto a LAN somewhere like at church that her files arn't visible to everyone.

UPDATE 21-3-2011
Have decided that sharing disks on each laptop  is not the way to go as it opens up a can of worms regarding security.
Now looking for a backup program that can be installed on each computer that will quietly check if the laptop can see the back up disk and if it can then it will do the backup task.  This way only the back up disk needs to be shared.

Backup programs 24-3-2011

GFI Backup
I did a full backup and then set it to do an incremental backup each hour.  I got to work and of course it could not see the back up disk. and it told me so.  I clicked every check box I could find but still every hour it popped up and let me know.  So it was uninstalled to save my sanity.

Syncback (Free)  http://www.2brightsparks.com/download-syncback.html
Does not do versioning.  Changed files over write old ones.
Does just copy in normal windows file format.  No special proprietary file format and no special restore tool required.

http://backup.comodo.com      ->Did not understand the user interace

EVACopy   -> Did not understand the user interace

Ace backup
have to use proprietary file format if versioning required
Dont know how to specify which directories to actually back up

personal backup   www.personal-backup.ratlev-home.de
This is a bit of a dangerous one as it would not uninstall.  After I ran the uninstaller, it was still there.  I rebooted and it tried to do a backup on shutdown.  After I managed to reboot, it was not present in start>programs etc but it was present in the system tray at the bottom right of the screen.  It was not present in Control panel> add remove programs.  Its still not actually removed but I have stopped it from starting.

http://www.freebyte.com/fbbackup/

Syncback SE    ($50)  http://www.2brightsparks.com
Looks like we will try this.