windows home serverI was reminded of this a few moments ago whilst doing something totally unrelated thinking about some friends who’ve just had a new baby…Can you get an old baby?…Anyway just before the stalk came along their laptop died, luckily they’d copied everything to an external hard drive (not actually everything I think couple of chapters of a book was lost).

You think about it, I know we probably all have, how much would your WAF go down if you lost all the pictures of the kids?  There’s loads of solutions out there for this, but I’ll tell you what mine is.  The way that I make sure stuff is always available.

I use Windows Home Server

Mine is actually just used for backups at the moment (picture above), but that will change when the Media Center runs out of space.  Windows Home Server (WHS) is great at backups, all you have to do is configure the client on the PCs you want backed up and schedule your backup to run.  I run all mine overnight, between 1am and 6am (but they actually only take 1 hour).  Because of that, I use a WHS add-in, Lights out, to control my WHS, it turns itself off at 6am and on at 1pm.  Also it uses 40kwh when on standby (I need to reduce that) and 140kwh when it’s powered up.

Backups are only as good as your ability to restore, so I restore a file or two regularly to check things out.  Another area where WHS excels is its ability to restore your whole computer, it’s really simple.

My backups don’t copy my Recorded TV, they are just too big and quite frankly I don’t care enough about those shows.  It does copy my archived TV though.

I use Live Mesh

I also have my most important files (my Documents and Pictures folders) shared in my Live Mesh.  Live Mesh is great, and free, for up to 5gb of storage.  My Mesh copies my pictures from my laptop to my Media Center and also to my Mesh Desktop.  Why on earth do I do this.  Simple really.  It’s off site storage, just in case something happens to all the kit in the house.

So what do you do, what tricks have I missed, what else could I do, what do you do?  Leave a comment.

0 thoughts on “Where’s your backup?”
  1. Im using Dropbox (getdropbox.com) at the moment, which means its backed up to all my computers and ‘the cloud’

  2. I’ve not tried to do any kind of backup of my WinMo in a long time. I use Live Mail to store my contacts and just sync that up, I store all my stuff on my MicroSD and it all seems to be safe and sound.

    And I rom update almost every month!

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