Thanks for the plug – when I looked earlier today we were on page one of Google and about 5th! I’ve asked all of the club members to log in daily for a week or so and maybe we will move into the number one spot!!

Thanks for all your help (but I still need guiding).

Love Dad xx

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Love Dad xx

Love

Dad xx

Sounds like you’re heading for a simpler approach than what I’m doing – no surprise there! Last time I looked, I decided J and I have just too much data for us to backup all online at the moment (at least 500GB of photo libraries for starters!).

Coincidentally I’ve been rejigging our backup arrangements recently – switching from Acronis True Image to Genie Timeline 2.0 to backup the data on our desktop machines locally to a second internal hard drive (not really an option for your laptops). Timeline stores an initial copy of everything, then stores any changes every 3 mins, so you can recover to a previous point in time. It makes much more efficient use of space than Acronis True Image did, which had lots of duplication between successive full backups.

I handle our offsite backup by collating all our “local’ backups onto a bare 1.5TB hard drive every few months and storing in a secure deposit box at a local bank (about £70 for the hard drive and £100/yr for the deposit box – possibly comparable costs to your online solution, but a bit more manual effort).

We handle syncing of key data (photo albums, music) between our machines and our NAS using robocopy scripts I’ve cooked up over the years – but then our current NAS (shiny new 2TB HDD hooked up to a Marvell Sheevaplug) is big enough to store master or slave copies of everything we sync. Lots of effort invested in all that scripting – so your SpiderOak “product” should be a much easier route!

The main benefit for our hassle is that local backups/restores and syncing are quick (Gigabit ethernet) – so backups are always up-to-date to within a handful of minutes and there’s no need to leave machines switched on so new files can be backed up. I guess if you wanted to you could achieve the same thing by upping the capacity of your NAS and syncing files with it, then backing that up to SpiderOak?

Are you going to try a full test restore? I don’t think I dare (and I’m not sure what that says about my confidence in my backup?!). Home users just aren’t set up with the necessary kit to test things, and J would kill me if I said we needed at least 2 of everything..!