Home Backup Policies

At my house, we have about 8 total computers running at any given time:

• a Media Center PC (media)
• a storage server (luna)
• 5 personal computers
• 1 or 2 work laptops

I needed a way to backup all of the data that is spread out over all of the computers, but I also couldn’t dedicate a single machine to only be for backups. The following system works for me, but it definitely could be improved, so keep that in mind when designing your own backup routines.

First, I want to get all of the personal computers’ data backed up. I use an iMac, so that’s taken care of with a 500GB external drive and Time Machine — definitely the easiest, most efficient backup I’ve ever used. The rest of the computers are PC’s, so I’ve installed SyncBack (freeware) on all of the machines. It is super easy to use and does an excellent job of scheduled backups.

To start, I setup backup space on both servers. I use dedicated hard drives in each server as the “backup” drive and share them across the network. Within each drive, I setup a folder for each machine that will backup to it. I have 2 computers backing up to one server and the rest to the other. If I had the space I’d have them all go to just one server, but with the way the files are distributed on each one, right now I can’t.

On each personal computer I setup 3 jobs in SyncBack:

1. Daily backup of all documents (I just backup the My Documents folder) to a “daily” folder; delete target files if not in origin (this basically makes the daily copy an exact replica of the source machine)
2. Weekly backup to a “weekly” folder; do NOT delete target files if not in origin. This means that if I backed up a file last week and deleted it on my computer this week, it will remain on my backup drive
3. Monthly backup; this is essentially the same as the weekly backup, but I DO delete target files that are not in the origin. This basically cleans up the “weekly” backup folder once a month of old files. You could choose to do this once every few months or once a year if you feel more comfortable and have the space to do so.

With this setup I always have two copies of each file in case I need to revert back to an older copy.

In addition to backing up the personal computers, I have setup backups of the servers where space allows me to. We bought a 500GB external drive that we are supposed to keep off-site (at work) except for one night a week when we bring it home to run backups. These backups are setup in SyncBack, also, and copy the entire Backup drives on both servers, as well as some of the data on the servers, such as movies, archived documents, tv shows, etc, that otherwise aren’t backed up.

With this system in place, I have recovered documents and restored crashed hard drives with minimal loss.

Like I said before, this system could definitely be improved, but right now space is a factor. I’m saving up to purchase a bunch of hard drives and RAID them in a NAS to provide redundancy and remove the requirement to backup everything to other servers or drives. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions, comments, or questions, please let me know in the comments!