Backup and Free File Sync
Backups...backups...backups... So critical, yet so difficult to be 100% confident. Simple answer is there is no one solution that will guarantee your data's safety.
Storing your data using RAID mirroring will help avoid annoyances of hard drives dying horribly at the wrong moment, but this doesn't give you any protection against fat fingers and removing a whole directory by accident. In fact my 3 year old daughter deleted a whole folder of music from a share on my NAS by accident just my leaning on the keyboard, yikes!
In my quest to enable simple file folder backups of data held on my NAS to give me an off-site backup, I still find the easiest solution is to copy it all to an external hard drive and hike it over to a friends house.
There are many file copy solutions, a solid one, probably built into your Windows operating system is Robocopy. This allows transfer of files and directories recursively including mirroring, where it will remove any files at the destination which are no longer at the source. If you don't using the mirroring option and just copy all your files, your still just overwriting the existing files, so what we really want is some kind of versioning.
Now I don't need anything complicated and I'm an avid fan of free software so I recommend you give Free File Sync a whirl. It's got a nice GUI, has all the file synchronising features you can think of, specifically including the option to version files you copy over, so if it can see the file already exists at the destination, it'll create a separate timestamped version, you can also specify a limit of how many historical copies it will keep. Certainly a nice way to keep track of things for a while without .
Don't forget, the only solid backup, is a tested backup and one that isn't at the same location as your current data; use a friend, use the cloud (DropBox, SkyDrive, Google Drive all have free storage options for at least your most important files).
Storing your data using RAID mirroring will help avoid annoyances of hard drives dying horribly at the wrong moment, but this doesn't give you any protection against fat fingers and removing a whole directory by accident. In fact my 3 year old daughter deleted a whole folder of music from a share on my NAS by accident just my leaning on the keyboard, yikes!
In my quest to enable simple file folder backups of data held on my NAS to give me an off-site backup, I still find the easiest solution is to copy it all to an external hard drive and hike it over to a friends house.
There are many file copy solutions, a solid one, probably built into your Windows operating system is Robocopy. This allows transfer of files and directories recursively including mirroring, where it will remove any files at the destination which are no longer at the source. If you don't using the mirroring option and just copy all your files, your still just overwriting the existing files, so what we really want is some kind of versioning.
Don't forget, the only solid backup, is a tested backup and one that isn't at the same location as your current data; use a friend, use the cloud (DropBox, SkyDrive, Google Drive all have free storage options for at least your most important files).
Don't wait till you lose everything to wish you'd done it sooner!
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