gotshoo?

I got a kick in the pants last week when the remnants of Hurricane Ike came through town and put a river of water in our basement. Even though it was a small stream of water to the drain and no damage was done except for some wet area carpets, that reminded me that I needed to do something about backing up our digital data.

For a short time I was uploading my pictures, music, and documents to my domain host for gotshoo.com as a backup. My account allowed for 350GB+ of storage and I wasn’t even close with web stuff I had out there. So I setup an automatic process with Rsync, a linux utility to sync directories, to upload new stuff every night. And that worked great till I got an email from my domain host stating that I was violating their terms of service, but for $20 extra a month I could keep uploading my stuff.

I graciously deleted my stuff and forgot all about any type of backups.

Backups are always an issue after you’ve lost the data, never before you lose it.

Mrs. Shoo has a laptop that she uses at home and occasionally takes to school. Sometimes she’ll copy her work over to a flash drive and copy it to her network drive at school. At the end of year last year, the computer guys told all the teachers to make sure to save any local data on their workstations to their network drive as their workstations were going to be wiped out with a new install. My wife being the diligent data up-keeper did that and made a backup to her flash drive.

Well, at the beginning of this year of course her data was gone from her network drive. She was lucky that she had backed it up herself.

And it’s always in the back of my head that I should make a backup because what if a hard drive crashes?

A good rule of thumb is that you can’t go wrong with 3 different types of backups. Example: A. To another computer, B. To a flash drive or any other media, C. To an online repository. Each has their drawbacks but the more redundancy the less chance of data loss.

A company I was indirectly working with had a storage device with a million images fail. They lost 2/3 of their data. Their backups were incomplete and they were not able to recover their lost images.

So I’ve been looking at different options in backing up the Shoo household data. My requirements are that it has to be cheap to affordable, automatic, and so easy that I don’t have to worry about Mrs. Shoo calling me if there are problems.

The first line of defense that we’re going with is the Windows Home Server. This Microsoft product has actually been getting rave reviews and a lot of positive feedback. It’s a system built on the very stable Windows Server 2003 platform, does redundant storage over multiple hard drives without RAID, and does automatic backups. Also has a web interface for downloading files from shared folders.

What’s great about it is that HP offers an appliance with hot swap hard drives or you can buy the OEM and build your own server. The software by itself is only $140, down from a $170, and you can order a 120 day trial from the Home Server website. I had an old AMD XP 1800 box laying around, so now I am putting it to good use.

To do automatic backups, you install a connector piece on the workstation that needs to be backup. It talks to the Home Server, defaults to backing the machine up between 12-6am and that’s about it. And that’s about as simple as a process I need. So as long as we leave our computers on at night, they’ll get backed up.

But I’d like to get our data physically outside of our house, so the next line of defense that I am working on getting setup is with Delta Copy, similar to Rsync but runs as a Windows service, to copy data to my parents’ house. Who knows, our house could be gone tomorrow.

What my Dad and I will need to do is open up the correct ports in our firewalls, create some login, and schedule the task. The hardest part will be setting up a time when we are both free to get it working.

So the Shoo’s will soon be backed up, of course there are a number of different ways that I could have done this, but setting up a Home Server and syncing up to my parents’ house seemed most viable for us.

For anyone looking to just do a simple backup for one computer, Vista has a pretty solid backup program that works great backing up to a flash or external hard drive.