Ask Engadget: Best home backup solutions?
posted Mar 17th 2005 8:33PM
We heard plenty of woeful tales of data loss during our data disaster contest from a few weeks back, and for this week's Ask Engadget reader Dan solicits some advice for how prevent disaster from happening in the first place:
I've been a reader of the site for a long time, so I don't know why I didn't think to contact you when I first started thinking about this. I hope one or many of the superior minds that reads Engadget might have already found a solution to the home backup problem I now have. In this day and age, I would think the "family-geek" (that is, the geek who've found that significant other, settled down, and possibly spawned new proc..er..other geeks) have a large amount of MP3s, videos, and photos of family and friends stored on their computers/phones/whatever. It wasn't until a couple of days ago that the implications of this hit me. Given how fragile data is, what's the best way to back it up? DVD? CD? Tape? It now appears that budget, or badly made CD-R and DVD+-R won't last forever, so long-term storage on that medium is out. So where do we go from here? What is the Engadget readership's take on disaster recovery?
Any suggestions?
I remeber first using audio tape for backup back in the commodore days. then VHS tape, then ditto. eventually move on to AIT. now, i just use HDD. with 160GB go for around 60 buck these days. i just setup a mid tower with 5 removeble 5.25 tray with 5 60GB running on 600Mhz using RAID 5. all for lest then 300 buck.
Anyone have any experience with the Mirra Personal Server?
www.mirra.com
It seems like a good solution.
I'm looking into getting one myself and was wondering if anyone had any experiences with this backup device.
You should try Magneto Optical disks or UDO disks from Verbatim - http://www.verbatimcorp.com. Magneto Optical disks have several GB of storage, and are supposed to last a long time. UDO disks have 30 GB of storage, and have a gauranteed lifetime of 50 years, which make them the better choice. They're also rewritable for thousands of times.
Use a Parrot. They tend to last 60+ years. Use a Text to Voice Converter to "download" the data into the Parrot. Just be careful for pirates, they like parrots. ARRRRR!!!!
ME, I can afford to loose my mp3's videos and even my documents but loosing my emails form outlook every time my pc crashes or wont boot unless i re install windows sucks
and that's were Gmail comes in, i have all my 4 email address forward my email to my gmail account. never again !
and for my music and videos and sensitive docs, i leave them on a seperate partition or drive so that i can always recover them.
Backup strategy - extra computers, and hard drives. My date differential takes about 15 minutes to xcopy every day or so.
Or you could alsways hit Ebay for a used DLT drive (check for the ones with 35Gb native).
They can be had pretty cheaply and the tapes will survive a lot of punishment (fall from 2 stories apperantly wasn't a problem :).
Ofcourse if you do get one, you need to make sure you have a SCSI card, and make sure you have enough space. These things ain't small.
However, if anyone has something that can store more information i'm all ears, 800Gb backups are a pain.
External USB or Firewire drives work nicely. I use a Firewire drive with my iMac and Retrospect to keep a clone of my main drive.
Ricky, remember, RAID isn't the same as a backup. Both protect you against disk failure, but RAID won't protect you from accidentally deleting files or corrupted files. It definitely won't protect you from theft or fire. And, if something goes wrong with your RAID (which has happened to me on several servers), you're totally outta luck.
So, here's may plan for my home office:
Every Sunday, I use WinRAR to backup the files on my laptop to a 160GB external hard disk. I have a script that keeps my last three full backups. This takes a long time to run, like 12 hours.
Every night, I schedule Windows Backup to save System State and a differential backup to the external hard disk. Windows Backup is quicker than WinRAR because it's not doing compression.
My wife's laptop backs up across the wireless network to an internal hard disk on my home Web server.
The Web server backs itself up from one internal disk to another every night with Windows Backup and a scheduled SQL database dump.
One more thing: off-site backups. Every six months or so, I backup my important files to DVDs (it takes like 10 DVDs), and take them out to my in-law's house. So, I'm not totally out of luck if there's fire, theft, or natural disaster.
Gmail as a backup drive! Better than nothing. Maybe a parrot for redundancy.
I have found through experience ( ie; heartbreak ) that multiple backup solutions are what work best. At least that is how I feel.
I have an external hard drive along with 3 drives in my case. I have approx. 110GB of MP3 files. I have copies of that 110GB folder on one of the 180GB drives in my case and also on the external drive. Being totally anal, I also have made MP3 DVD's for the entire collection as well. Same thing for photos, video, etc;.
For important emails I just forward copies to one Gmail account ( out of 10 ) that I have just for that purpose.
Anyone have any ideas about software that would allow me to build my own mirra like box? I like the functionality of it, but the price is rediculous!
as, others have said, gmail is a great backup. I've created several accounts each with specified types of files. Some people may say that you can't store more than 10mb at a time on gmail, but this isn't true. Gmail simply won't let you send anything over 10mb, what you have to do is send it to yourself and after a few seconds gmail says that the message could not be delivered, just click ok and check your sent mailbox, the complete file is their even though gmail said that it was never "sent"
as, others have said, gmail is a great backup. I've created several accounts each with specified types of files. Some people may say that you can't store more than 10mb at a time on gmail, but this isn't true. Gmail simply won't let you send anything over 10mb, what you have to do is send it to yourself and after a few seconds gmail says that the message could not be delivered, just click ok and check your sent mailbox, the complete file is their even though gmail said that it was never "sent"
Mirra Personal Server is the way to go. I have used it for 9 months and it is wonderful. For about $300 you get a box with a 120 GB hard drive and software that is effortless. It is easy to setup and once it is setup you NEVER have to do anything or worry about it again. It keeps multiple versions of files and deleted files. I have never had a HD crash, but I have recovered files several times. For example, my Quicken database somehow got partially corrupted so I just recovered versions from Mirra until I found one that was OK. (It was the 2nd backup version and I only lost a few hours of work!!!) The best thing is that I never have to remember to do anything and I don't have to worry.
The Mirra box connects to your home network and all you do is indicate which folders on which computers you want to backup and it does all the rest.
I am not associated with Mirra in any way except as a happy customer of their products. Check it out at www.mirra.com .
Buy an external USB drive case and a huge hard drive (120GB+) then back up critical files to it on a regular basis.
Not perfect but probably the most economical method for large (+40GB) amounts of data and comes with the extra benefit of being portable.
I use a external full size case to back up my desktop computer to a 120GB HD and a 3.5" case with a 60GB notebook drive for my laptop.
I have a mac, i was wondering what the best type of External HD i should get. i was looking at lacie, seagate, and western digital, but so far im heading for lacie. i would like it to be firewire too. anyone else have any suggestions?
thanks.
Use Norton Ghost to "xerox" your hard drive's contents over to another HDD. But... this will only work on x86 systems... not processors for PPC (Mac), MIPS, etc.
Of course, it helps if you have a spare HDD of equal or greater capacity. But it'll cost a lot less $$$ than some of the previous suggestions I've seen here.
I am paranoid so I want a copy outside of the building in case of fire, flood, earthquake...
Would recommend an external drive, laCie works fine.
If you are not backing up tremendous amounts, DVD is quick and dirty.
#14: Buy an internal drive and an external enclosure. That way you can buy whatever drive you want; you're not limited to just those few choices. Plus, it's a lot cheaper.
As to the original question, the only real answer is a combination of strategies. Ideally you want to have multiple backups on different mediums. Obviously this can be a real pain in the butt, but you can use tools like Nero to automate it (that's what I use; it'll do incremental backups and it works over a network). I back up to both DVD and to other hard drives, depending on what I'm backing up (stuff I use or change a lot I just have spanning multiple drives on different PC's; it's just quicker to back up that way).
The easiest and cheapest thing to do is honestly just buy a second hard drive and mirror your current one to it. Do not leave it in your PC, though; just fire it up whenever you want to do a backup, then put it away. (This will extend its life.) This is very easy with an external drive, or as I said before, an internal drive in an external enclosure. It is highly unlikely that *both* your main drive *and* your backup drive would fail simultaneously, especially if you are not even running your backup drive at the time (it should be locked away in a closet or something). It won't be susceptible to a bad power supply or a fall off a desk or anything like that if it's not in the PC.
If you still worry even after doing that, though, then yeah, just take your most important files and also keep them on a DVD.
None of this stuff is permanent, but backups by nature should not be permanent - there's no point restoring your system or your files from a backup that's ten years old. Eventually you'll move on to something else (another new hard drive, rewritable Blu-Ray or whatever), but that's just the nature of backups. The point is to have something available that can restore your *current* system or files, not the system as you had it many years ago.
I believe in multiple copies across diferent hard disks. Athough I know that they are not safe if something goes horribly wrong, like a fire or theft, it's the cheapest and safest when you can't afford or spare a second machine.
If I had the required funds, I'd invest in a tape drive. Tapes are safe, fast, and IMHO the most pratical media to rescue a single file from, and the most rugged type of media to keep an off site, ahm, off home copy.
Now the parrot thing totally reminded me of that 'Johnny Mnemonic' flic... But parrots are good. Always keep one around for emergencies. :)
My recommendations to clients is that they use plain old CD-Rs (not CD-RWs -- CD-Rs typically burn faster and are less expensive) when they do their daily data backups and then occasionally create a Ghost image of their drive on a quarterly (or more frequent basis). Because we are computer geeks, we have the drive to Ghost to and then burn them to media and/or backup them up on our tape drive.
Now when it comes to privacy, you don't just want to burn CDs normally - you loose the CD, people can easily read what is on the CD. So we use Nero 6 Ultra Edition with their automatic backup and password protection feature. Is it 100% secure, no, but it sure is better than just burning files to CD.
And remember, if you backup, you have to VERIFY that what your backing up can be restored!!
Iomega REV. It rocks. See the specs here: http://www.iomega.com/na/products/family-save.jsp and then shop around. I bought my drive and media at Dell (there's always a coupon deal you can use ... or several ... to bring the prices down significantly). It's fast, removable (therefore you can store it remotely ... if an anvil drops out of the sky onto your computer you can get another computer and recover your data onto it), comes with USB 2.0 and/or IEEE 1394 interfaces, and just plain easy to use.
I have an older computer set up on my home network as a file/print/Tivo server with a 40GB HDD for my Windows installation and 2 200GB HDDs - one used as a share drive and one used to back up the share drive automatically every night while I'm sleeping. All computers in my home have their "My Documents" folders assigned to the server's share drive. That way I can access any document, photo, mp3, etc. from any computer. I also have Firefox's "bookmarks.html" file on the sharedrive so all computers on the network access the same bookmarks.
well what i do is,
i have alot of pic/movies/documents/music on my hard drive but i got scared, so i got an external hard drive that i have uploaded everything to, all my music is on my ipod and every year i copy all my pics to a cd-r just in case. when blue ray comes out, i plan to fully use that option too.
Iomega REV. It rocks. See the specs here: http://www.iomega.com/na/products/family-save.jsp and then shop around. I bought my drive and media at Dell (there's always a coupon deal you can use ... or several ... to bring the prices down significantly). It's fast, removable (therefore you can store it remotely ... if an anvil drops out of the sky onto your computer you can get another computer and recover your data onto it), comes with USB 2.0 and/or IEEE 1394 interfaces, and just plain easy to use.
I'm totally happy with my Buffalo TeraStation 1.0TB NAS.
http://www.buffalotech.com/products/product-detail.php?productid=97
1000GB of file storage and Raid 1,5 (I use a 750GB Raid5 profile). Also has 4 USB host ports and to autobackup to USB Hard drives in mutliple configurations. Gigabit Ethernet and built in Media server software round out this puppy.
Did I mention that I picked it up for about $800 US?
After testing out a few personal backup software packages, I decided on Handy Backup (http://www.handybackup.com/) which is running on my laptop (and the other PCs in our house) to create several backup jobs that run each night (between 1am and 3 am). I group types of files into different backup sets (office docs, Outlook pst files, data files from some apps, photos, etc.). These are backed up to a networked drive on my home network (160GB Buffalo NAS). This protects me from a hard drive crash on my PC. I also use Handy Backup to sync (or copy) the files from my hosted websites -- don't want to lose that data either.
I also store my 40 GB of mp3s on the Buffalo NAS drive. I've added another Buffalo 160GB USB2.0 drive connected directly to the Buffalo NAS drive in order to keep a copy of the mp3s and video files. This protects me from the NAS drive crashing. I also use Handy Backup to keep these two drives in sync instead of the standard Buffalo backup app.
And for a last line of defense (which I'm not so great about doing) is identifying the critical files and burning a data-DVD and sending 'off-site' -- to a relative out of state. This protects from a fire or earthquake (I'm in San Francisco). Handy Backup can actually be scheduled to write to a DVD drive.
Make a list of the data and files you transfer to a new PC -- that's what you should be backing up on a regular basis.
I bought a Iomega REV Drive FireWire 6 months ago and it works great. I backup my media server and 2 pc's and 1 mac. It works great on all operating systems with native backup software. For a fraction of the cost of traditional backup systems, the Iomega REV drive gives you removable storage with hard disk performance thats up to 8?faster than tape. With compact, rugged 35GB disks that can store up to 90GB of compressed data you can back up all your files, protect your systems.
And all that for only $290 from dell.com
External hard drive. First of all, it's got the best price per gigabyte, but more importantly it encourages frequent backups. Not having to swap DVD's/tapes means you're more likely to backup, and what good is a backup if it's out of date. Finally, you can usually find free file synchronization programs to do the heavy lifting.
JayDox, building your own Mira like server, in my opinion, is best done with Linux. I've got roughly the equivelant of the Mira on a Gentoo "headless" box. Combine a server with something like dyndns.org and you've got remote access via ftp, http, and ssh. Another plus to this setup is the fact that you can add storage as you go and it works as a remote desktop with VNC or, what I recomend, nomachine.com's NX server.
Time was tape was the best solution, it used to be very common for the dominant HD size of the time to have a corresponding tape size available.
But since you don't want a tape the size of a tire Hard disks are probably your best bet. To protect against single hard drive failure you can set up mirroring (Raid 0) within one machine.
With three or more HD's of the same size you can create a real raid array (Raid 3) which is theoretically self repairing should one of the drives fail (keep in mind, I've seen raid restores not work though sometimes).
Getting a little more drastic, you can build a low cost second machine using low end or last gen hardware (Think Athlon XP's, Sempron's, or Celerons) and build a very stable, inexpensive second machine with any of the HD setups already mention and then sync the two machines during the night (scheduled tasks with Robocopy.exe from the NT resource kit is an inelegant but very workable solution) preferably keeping the machines in two separate rooms. You might even spring for gigabit ethernet cards (since they're only $10 - $15) and a crossover cat5e cable if you have a LOT of data.
Periodic backups with removable HD's that can be locked in fireproof containers are good if you suspect something might physically happen to you machine (fire, water, vengence seeking girlfriend,etc...).
Tape drives ARE still available, and with compression you can pack maybe 80gb on a DLT tape...the drives are expensive though, and I think the tapes are like $25 a piece (I could be wrong though), not to mention the software (Arcserve is probably best, and failing that BackupExec)
Most of these solutions are gonna cost a good amount of money and are a little more corporate than the average user might need (it's all in how much your data is worth to you).
For home use I am currently using Single layer discs (cheaper per GB that Dual layer). I am considering purchasing one of those plastic bag vacum sealers in an attempt to combat the oxidization that we've come to find can limit optical medias life. It's time consuming if you have 100gb+ of stuff to backup, but I feel better with non-magtetic media, and there's not really THAT much that is crucial to me.
Probably a combination of these (and everyone elses) methods would be best.
No matter what hardware/software solution you go with, just make sure you actually run your backups on time...that's where most people (corporate and private) get messed up. A test restore after initial setup to make sure you can actually retrieve your data is not a bad idea either.
Hope this helps...
To all the folks who use gmail as backup...
I'm all for using it as a drive to store, say, my mp3 files so I can get them anywhere...but what about when the GMail system goes down and Google decides to cut their losses and start from scratch. I don't see anything in their TOS that states that they have to be able to keep a copy of anything in any GMail account (specifically: "Google disclaims all responsibility and liability for the availability, timeliness, security or reliability of the Service." - http://www.google.com/gmail/help/terms_of_use.html), let alone the fact that having more than one is almost certainly outside the license agreement ("...users may not...Create multiple user accounts...", http://www.google.com/gmail/help/program_policies.html).
Not a backup regimen from my standpoint....
For Mac OSX, any recommendations for best backup scheduling software? (preferrably f/oss)
I use Unison(open source backup utility) and a second hard drive, to backup important directories on my master hard drive.
It's much easier to setup than RAID, so definetly worth a look.
Upon reading the rest of the comments it sounds like it does exactly what this MIRA box does, but for free.
On my old machine I used 4x80GB drives for a RAID 0+1 setup. Nice and fast with redundancy = great. When I upgraded to a Shuttle PC I was tempted to get two hard drives and just mirror them, but in the end I opted to use my old machine as a server running Windows 2003. The drive in the shuttle is basically a scratch disk, with nothing really important on it at all. Bonus is that I now have a decent server hooked up permanently to the net and serving videos and MP3s to my Xbox wirelessly :D
The three most vital peices of data I have are email, website files, and passwords. I think the most elegent solution to backing up email is to use IMAP. In my case, I generally have a copy no older than a day on my desktop, laptop, and the server. It's all perfectly transparent, not to mention convenient.
Web site files are a bit trickier, but since they're websites I generally have a copy of most related stuff on a server and on at least one of my computers.
As for passwords... I'm not really gonna talk about where they are, other than to say I've given up trying to keep them in my head.
While a hard drive is the best solution for quick, near line storage; What about disaster recovery?
With that in mind, go to www.streamload.com. They give you 10gb of storage for free with a 100mb download/month, and if you need to download it, just pay the nominal fee to get it all back. Worth the piece of mind.
Get 2 internal hard drives(Price depends on the size). Get 2 enclosures($50). Get one Linksys NSLU2 ($60) Plug NSLU2 to your WIFI router.
Thats it. Hack your way through NSLU2(its a barebones linux machine which partitions the drives as ext3)
Automatic hands free backup/remote storage solution.
Great remarks 'Carbsumer'. To stress this point again, RAID only guards against drive failures. If data becomes: corrupted, mistakenly delete, physical damage, power spikes, or even theft; you're S.O.L. I think it's imperative for ALL users to have AT THE VERY LEAST, a UPS powering their computer and perform regular backups.
For small personal backups, I recommend HandyBackup (http://www.handybackup.com). If you use this, be sure to backup the data to both your computer and a share on another machine. The program does a good job of compressing and storing just incremental data changes.
For large amounts of data, I use a linux machine with a program called rdiff-backup (http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/). This will allow you to backup *NIX machines, via ssh, or mount/backup Windows shares.
Of course very critical data needs to be stored completely offsite. Many of my clients have horror stories of natural disaster, power issues, water damage of multiple computers, and theft. I own an offsite backup company, and with our client software, customers' data is pushed to our servers housed in a truly fortified datacenter. All data is mirrored on 2 seperate servers and 4 hard drives at all times. All the data is encrypted so only you can decrypt your data. Feel free to contact me if you're interested or have questions in an offsite backup service sales@choicebackup.com. Otherwise, if not choicebackup, its imperative to perform regular backups and store duplicates offsite.
Offsite Backup Solutions:
http://www.choicebackup.com
I use both Windows and Linux, and I have a Dell DJ MP3 player with a 20GB drive, which works well with both OSes. The only MP3s I have are ripped from my own CDs, plus about 100MB of songs downloaded from the artist's websites or mp3.com from back in the day, so I don't need massive amounts of storage. Even so, they make up the largest portion of my backed-up data, at approx. 8GB. Another 3-4GB is my photo collection (family, friends, pets, places), and finally my miscellaneous documents, at about 1GB. All of this fits on the DJ with room to spare; the DJ stays in my truck unless I'm backing up to it so it's technically "off-site". I also have the downloaded (i.e. irreplaceable) MP3s, photos and documents backed up on CD-R, although I don't consider that a reliable long-term backup since my personal experience with CD-R lifespan is around 6 years.
My dad, who has just recently gotten into computers, has a more complicated but very effective approach. He has one computer with two DVD burners and a removeable IDE hard drive caddy, with a total of 4 swappable hard drives. He runs Windows XP on one drive, and Windows 2000 on another. Using Norton Ghost, he backs up each drive to DVD-RW several times a week, then restores from DVD to each of his two remaining drives. So in essence, he has 4 hard drives, two with Win2k and two with WinXP. That way, if he has a drive go bad during use, he can just shut down, swap with the clone, and be back to surfing the web (pretty much all he does with it) in a matter of minutes. Later, he can replace the bad drive and restore the disk image to it from DVD. Oh, and the reason for the two DVD burners? He learned from past experience with CD burners that heavy use tends to shorten the life of the drive. He now alternates between the DVD burners so they will last longer.
rsync and crontab is your friend for backup. as for medium, an external drive is sufficient.
MirrorFolder (http://www.techsoftpl.com/backup/) will mirror selected files to a second drive in real time. Implemented as a device driver and is incredibly fast.
Keeping backups offsite is important for the obvious reasons (fire, theft, etc...). A lot of portable mp3 players have huge hard drives capable of backing up everything on your computer. As long as your critical files are encrypted, I think using your mp3 player as a backup hard drive should be painless enough to do on a regular basis.
I was wondering if there was any way hook my mac up to my pc and use my PC's HD as a backup hardrive. i know i can put my powerbook in firewire disk mode and drag the files from that drive to the pc but i was wondering if i can hook a firewire cable of ehtehrnet or someting up to the pc and use an application on my mac to mirror the image of the selected directories to the mac.
I just want to pipe in that USB/Firewire HD Enclosure's aren't foolproof either. Mine has been wiped out 3 times already - mass storage devices should NEVER be unplugged while data transfer is in progress.
Great to know, but occassionally accidents happen (loss of power in the middle of transfering files, or computer freezes while dumping stuff to the drive...).
Pain in the butt. Redundancy is the key. I use two firewire drives, and a semi-annual backup to DVDR
www.alwayssure.com -- simple, hands off...
I use a pair of external firewire drives (Seagate 400GB). I do full back-ups to one of them every week or so using softare that comes with the drives. I keep the second drive off-site in a safe-deposit box. I swap the two drives every couple of months. In addition I have a custom AppleScript that copies an encrypted archive of my most important files to my key fob USB drive (CruzerMicro), my phone's SD card, and my Apple iDisk account.
i'd like to contribute to this thread- i'm a professional nerd, so i consider myself fairly knowledgeable about these things.
First off, external drives are great, and extremely inexpensive, particularly if you just run down to fry's or compusa and buy an enclosure , which typically saves you a few dollars over the all in one seagate or maxtor products.
generally think about price per gig when buying the drive to go into your enclosure, performance specs probably don't matter too much, as cache and RPM will be subservient to USB wirespeed anyways.
I myself prefer a NAS (network attached storage, previously out of the reach of consumers, but now very affordable) solution, basically one of these drives with built in ethernet usually running a stripped down linux variant- some of them are more elaborate, with FTP capabiity and more security and folder sharing options.
you can also buy a small box that will allow you to take your external USB drive and make it networked, like the very popular and capable linksys NSLU2, or the very similar dlink product.
these devices cost about 60-100 bucks, and are fantastic for creating shared backup, as well as a file server for your household.
for all in one NAS products, PC mag just gave a favorable review to the new Maxtor 300 gig NAS, which is very inexpensive when priced gig per dollar.
something more functional that also acts as a print server would be the buffalo linkstation, which features an internal drive, and an additional 2 USB 2.0 ports that allow you to expand storage and share a printer to your household.
let me just say, all of these NAS type solutions should work with just about every backup utility out there, as they all allow you to map a remote file system as a target.
now- what about the software component?
i wont go to much into various back up strategies and things like bare metal recovery from a failure, but i've used products like retrospect before, and i must say that i really prefer bit copy "image" type products to the file based incremental backup tools.
a few years ago, people seriously questioned whether or not you could actually make a bit copy of a live running windows partition, because obviously certain files would be locked in use, but this is an issue of the past with XP and new virtual drivers that "shadow" windows while its running.
dont believe me? the product i would recommend to you all, acronis true image, is also the top choice of PC magazine. i will state that i am not affiliated with the company, i just like their product, and they're local here to me in san francisco.
acronis true image does a bunch of neat stuff, but basically you can schedule it to run and take a snapshot of your drives and everything on them, and then write that compressed image to your USB external or NAS drive somewhere on your network.
it also does incremental backup from its last point, and then (really cool) it allows you to mount that backup image as a virtual drive, which means you can browse into your files and get that old resume or whatever.
acronis also automatically creates a failsafe recovery CD (which is linux based, works on everything) and also allows you to migrate all of your stuff to a new drive, if you decide to upgrade to a bigger one- an incredibly handy feature i used when i moved to a new motherboard that had serial ATA.
acronis is also extremely efficient, user friendly, low overhead, and non-intrusive.
in my own place, i use a Kuro box, which is basically an open source version of the buffalo linkstation that runs hackable linux and is basically a real server, with ftp, ssh, apache, etc...for those nerds out there, its nice to be able to ssh into your home network and grab a file, or run an ftp server.
this box has a 300 gig internal drive, and an external 200 gig usb drive with a samsung laser printer that is shared to the household.
i run acronis scheduled backups once every two weeks to a shared folder on the kuro box. if any of the machines ever dies, i just run the recovery cd and point to that network shared folder to restore.
if i ever need archived material, i just start acronis and mount the backup image as a a virtual drive.
this backup strategy covers my main desktop machine, my thinkpad for work, and my girlfriends desktop machine. it runs unattended, and also allows me to have a fileserver and print server for the household. the kuro box (which again, is the equivalent of the buffalo linkstation) runs all the time, and consumes barely any power. This is the great thing about these new consumer oriented devices that run embedded linux, usually with a power pc processor.
depending on how fancy you'd want to get, you'd spend about 60 bucks on acronis (don't quote me on that, not actually sure what it costs) and anywhere from 200-300 on your NAS device, which might be an all in one solution, or the cheap and effective linksys NSLU2, which can be had for as little as 70 bucks.
say you get a 200 gig drive (120-ish) and the NSLU2, should set you back about 200 bucks.
so one could implement a great solution for 260 bucks.
if willing to forgo the NAS component, just pick up a cheap USB 2.0 drive enclosure for twenty bucks, a samsung 160 gig spinpoint (very quiet reliable drive) for 90 bucks, and buy acronis- grand total 170 bucks or thereabouts....
hope that helps everyone out.
for anyone who'd like to google this solution, search for "buffalo linkstation" "maxtor 300 NAS" "acronis true image" "linksys NSLU2" "dlink DWL-120", and for cheap drive USB drive enclosures, you can't beat newegg.com for selection.
Regarding post 18, if you have a Mac you can do the same thing with Carbon Copy Cloner. It's a little slow but hey, it's free.
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html