I’ve been tooling around with various methods of backing up the enormous amount of semi-precious data we’ve got floating around at home - photos of the kids, freelance projects, family tree research, and other stuff we would hate to lose.
I wasted an entire day earlier in the week fiddling with an EEE PC, seeing if I could turn it into a file server of sorts. I was only doing that because the MyBook World Edition I bought from PC World is pathetic, and will be going back at the earliest opportunity.
One of my colleagues rode to my rescue with “CrashPlan” (http://crashplan.com) - a fantastic multi-platform backup tool that lets you do all kinds of tricks, and ends up being cheaper than any other service I’ve tried (I managed to make BackBlaze cook itself pretty quickly).
So far, I’ve got CrashPlan doing the following
Macbook backs up to the Dell desktop machine
Dell Desktop machine backs up to an external drive
Dell Desktop also backs up to the cloud
The great part above the above is the last stage is the only one that costs any money - the rest is completely free. The computers on your network at home all see each other, and you can setup plans between them - in this case I’m giving all the real grunt work to our Dell desktop machine.
I’m not worried about backing up anything on my ASUS Netbook because I try not to save anything big on it; I use Google Docs and/or Dropbox wherever possible.
Here ends today’s soapbox speech spectacular.