What's the best way to backup a household of computers portably?

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My household has a grand total of about 7computers (1 Mac, 6 Windows). I want
to backup all of the important files on each computer. I also want to keep
the entire backup off-site (as in, school, work, etc. buildings so that if,
God forbid, my house burns down, I don't lose all of the computers AND the
backup. What would be the best way to do this? Should I just buy an external
hard drive with a few hundred GB or a TB and copy the files onto that? Any
suggestions? Thanks.
 
Alright, thanks very much, i'll look into that

David B. said:
An external drive would probably be the simplest solution, or a drive in a
removable rack in one PC, share the drive over the network, would have
faster transfer rates than an external USB.

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Click to expand...
 
My household has a grand total of about 7computers (1 Mac, 6 Windows). I want
to backup all of the important files on each computer. I also want to keep
the entire backup off-site (as in, school, work, etc. buildings so that if,
God forbid, my house burns down, I don't lose all of the computers AND the
backup. What would be the best way to do this? Should I just buy an external
hard drive with a few hundred GB or a TB and copy the files onto that? Any
suggestions? Thanks.
Click to expand...

That's what I do. ;-)

If you buy one of the popular Seagate external USB/firewire external
drives which run off a seperate power supply you can back up all your
computers to this single backup drive. As a bonus these drives come
with Bounce Back, a simple yet powerful backup application that can
automate the whole backup process. I have over 1 TB worth of files and
many externals. Works for me.

What I like best is I control what to back up when. Some drives I back
up every day, others once a week, some less often. I forget, I thing
the drives come preformatted for FAT32, so first thing is you need to
reformat to NTFS. Once you do that, set up as many folders as you
want, like one for each computer. Then from within Bounce Back you
decide which folders on your systems to monitor and back up.

The neat part is you can include/excude whatever you want and if you
pick the compare option Bounce Back will scan the folders you told it
to monitor, then compare what it already has a back up for, then
present a list of what files you have already backed up you have since
deleted and offers you the option to purge backups of these deleted
files, Of course it also shows file by file what needs backing up,
showing full details in a spreadsheet like list of all the file
particulars. You then select some or all of the files on the list to
"backup". Easy, fast, painless. Restoring is just as simple, just
works in reverse.

I don't know if Seagate upgraded their software yet, some Seagate
models come with a "backup" button right on the front of the drive
itself that under XP you could push and just that one button did
everything. I never used that much preferring the compare list method
instead, which works fine in Vista. I don't know if or not Bounce Back
comes with models that don't have a backup button as a feature. You
can buy or get a upgraded version of Bounce Back sold seperately.
 
Now in Beta testing is Microsoft's "Windows Home Server" - based on the
Small Business Server it has modifications to support "home" use.

One of it's functions will be the ability to backup all computers in its
network. Restoration will be via a restore CD.

Another interesting idea is that the OS will not assign drive letters to
individual HDs. For example there are two dives, 100 gigs each, rather than
designated as drive c, d, etc. - the OS will consider that a "mass storage
device" of 200 gigs is installed.
 
This is so annoying..... said:
My household has a grand total of about 7computers (1 Mac, 6 Windows). I
want
to backup all of the important files on each computer. I also want to keep
the entire backup off-site (as in, school, work, etc. buildings so that
if,
God forbid, my house burns down, I don't lose all of the computers AND the
backup. What would be the best way to do this? Should I just buy an
external
hard drive with a few hundred GB or a TB and copy the files onto that? Any
suggestions? Thanks.
Click to expand...

In addition to the suggestions about external USB drives, you might also
consider a NAT drive, i.e. a hard drive that sits on your network in its own
enclosure. I took an old computer and set it up as a Linux file server
which does, essentially, the same thing. The advantage of the file server
approach is that I can have virtually unlimited storage, and the files are
accessible to all machines on my network.
 
This is going to be a very cool product IMO. Besides the "whole house"
backup including dedupe between systems, the ability to expand storage in
its adaptable RAID at will with whatever is on hand are what sell this for
me. I just hope that between now and release (fall?), the marketing guys
don't get a hold of it and decide it's too useful so they need to cripple it
or raise the price. Here's a good review if you aren't familiar with it.

http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/whs_preview.asp
 
This said:
My household has a grand total of about 7computers (1 Mac, 6 Windows). I want
to backup all of the important files on each computer. I also want to keep
the entire backup off-site (as in, school, work, etc. buildings so that if,
God forbid, my house burns down, I don't lose all of the computers AND the
backup. What would be the best way to do this? Should I just buy an external
hard drive with a few hundred GB or a TB and copy the files onto that? Any
suggestions? Thanks.
Click to expand...
No idea how much you want to spend or how important your data is but
you may want to take a look at Lockstep for Workgroups. Works great.

http://www.lockstep.com/

gls858
 
David said:
Running a beta of it now, I'm impressed so far, however it doesn't help
as far as off site storage.
Click to expand...
What we do is use 3 usb drives one for the repository and 2 for the
mirror. We swap out the mirrored drive every day and take it off site.
Added expense, but usb drives are pretty reasonable these days.

gls858
 
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