Planning to buy two new desktops (office - home) located in two contiguous rooms, obviously with Win 8. Alternative would be only one new plus an existing one running XP.

Considering an additional laptop which is connected from time to time, I would like to implement something not crazily expensive to keep a continuous (automatic) backup of whatever I have in each one. Redundant backup I guess.

What is the simplest scheme I should consider? I presume that something is to be kept running most of the time (whatever is the part in charge of the back up, isn't it?).

Once, I asked at a shop and the clerk started to mention servers and wifi and incredible prizes. I almost run away that time.

I am not into gaming nor videos. Just Office with pictures and .pdf as the final outcome plus all related with Electronics.
If I could add the printer / scanner working in common I would be even happier.

Ideas or tips about what to look for, appreciated.

 

External hard drive and a program to keep it updated or a second internal hard drive configured as a RAID system. Then there is some kind of "cloud" backup available as a Micro$oft program that came with Vista. Probably still available for free. There are several free cloud spaces and, there are ways to rent cloud space.

 

A simple RAID NAS device physically separated from the client computers for disk images and incremental backups with archival grade DVDs for important data is a good backup system. Internal RAID on the client is not backup, it's only redundancy.

I've used this software at home and work for years: http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/trueimage/

 

I have two desk tops and three laptops, $35.00 for Acronis and a WD external hard drive keeps all backed up.
Max.

 

I have two desk tops and three laptops, $35.00 for Acronis and a WD external hard drive keeps all backed up.
Max.

How is the linking scheme? Do they form a network? Do they see each other?

Could you please elaborate?

 

WD = Western Digital brand.
I'm posting this because it took me a few seconds to interpret the letters.
Somebody else might be a bit slow, too.

I got Acronis for (allegedly) free with a Seagate brand hard drive purchase.

 

Straight image backup is less attractive these days for several reasons.

Firstly the size of modern disks and the quantity of material that has to be copied each time makes a backup take significant time in hours. I have a client who now has so much he cannot copy it all over night.

And don't think because you are not a heavy data generator you will not have significant stuff on the drive.
Microsoft seems to think an update a day keeps the virus doctor away.
Of course this is not rue, which brings me smartly to my third point.

Do you really want a backup copy contaminated by warts and viruses and all?

What if you are hit by an encryptor virus?

You should find a way to isolate the important data ( a second data partition is good, a second drive is better) and back this up separately.
This will be significantly less than copying the whole drive.

For example the night audit produces two zip files one of 20MB and one of 60MB containing a log of all the day's transactions for a small business network of 1 server plus a dozen pc workstations, mixed W7 and XP.

The two files are backed up, every night to a set of dedicated memory sticks, labelled Monday, Tuesday....
That way there is always never more than a day's transactions to restore and a week's worth of backups.

Time to backup well

Stick the pendrive into the server, run the attached batch file (using proper sourcefile names and changing the extension to dotbat)
About 30 seconds

 

How is the linking scheme? Do they form a network? Do they see each other?

Could you please elaborate?

At the moment I just have it portable, also you do not need to do a whole image once a backup is done, the next is just an incremental.
I also got the whole Acronis package that included Disk Director, this sets up different operating systems on the same HD as well as other features.
Max.