Setting up offsite backup for home use

H

hiodie

Gawd
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Aug 24, 2008
Messages
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I have multiple copies of the things I consider important, but most of the time, they are all together in my house, rendering them useless to a fire or other disaster. What I would like to do is put a hard drive in my parent's computer that I can access and backup to. I know little to nothing when it comes to accessing computer remotely outside of logmein (I think I used remote desktop assistance? a long time ago). Both networks have DSL and will have dynamic addresses.

The computer that hosts the original files runs Win7 Pro and I am intending on putting XP Pro on my parents (god they hate change), but I might be able to convince them to go with Win7 if it makes this much easier. I would rather have a backup that I can access files in instead of some sort of archive file. Speeds will be slow, but I will do the entire backup over LAN or USB initially.

Please let me know what questions I need to answer and any recommendations to look at.
 
/usr/home said:
If you're able to pay 5 bucks a month, take a look at Crashplan.
Click to expand...

crashplan user here an love it. I have over 500GB from 4 machines backed up using the family plan or whatever it is called now.

Crashplan also allows you to use their client software for free. What you can do with this is run crashplan to backup to other machines on your network or even across the internet to say your friend/parents machine. This method is free, the pay for stuff is to backup to Crashplan servers.
 
Looks pretty good. I'm assuming with it running on the destination computer I would not need to do any sort of DNS lookup for when the IP address is renewed? Also, can it be set to wake the computer (destination, mine is always on)
 
hiodie said:
Looks pretty good. I'm assuming with it running on the destination computer I would not need to do any sort of DNS lookup for when the IP address is renewed? Also, can it be set to wake the computer (destination, mine is always on)
Click to expand...

I have actually never done the backup to destination across the internet so not sure, but I believe the crashplan server acts as a sort of dyndns for you since you end up doing a handshake between the source and destination machines when you first setup the backup.

Yes it will do WOL however again not sure about when doing it across the internet, but it does do this for LAN.
 
IMO no point in going with spideroak. AFAIK crashplan offers the same features and is much cheaper.

There is no reason you cannot backup to your parents machine but honestly, paying for crashplan is the way to go. Much higher level of redundancy and a lot less hassle.
 
Use a service for the backups. Do not rely on your parents machine to back up your data. If they have problems, then your backups have problems. Not worth the hassle. Third party service is always there, always available, not getting infected with virus, spyware whatever to mess with your backups. Make sure you encrypt your own data before backing it up. If you do not want to use a service, get a pair of external drives and store one at your parents house. Rotate the two so you always have one at your house you can back up to and have the second offsite at your parents house.
 
Is anyone else having problems with Crashplan in the last few weeks? Basically it seems to be causing media (music & video) to stutter and skip at a fairly regular rate. It took a while to figure out that it was Crashplan doing this because pausing or exiting the program wouldn't stop the stuttering; it was only when I uninstalled Crashplan that the stuttering ended. I left my PC without Crashplan for about 2 weeks then reinstalled it and the stuttering came back immediately. I'm so disappointed because I was loving Crashplan but now I can't have it installed without ruining my PC media experience.


I submitted a support ticket to Crashplan but haven't received a response yet. I'm hoping this is just a bug and will be fixed ASAP.

EDIT:
System specs
i7 920 @ 3.5 GHz
6GB RAM
Crucial M4 128 GB (Windows 7 64bit & programs)
Intel 80 GB X25-M G2 (programs)
3 other hard drives
eVGA GTX 580
 
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