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There is one thing in life that is certain. Hard drivers get cheaper and bigger.

For the past year I’ve been using a Windows Home Server to backup 6 computers in my life. If there is one piece of technology you should down it’s a Home Server. It has literally probably saved my wife from devastation at least once (she completely horked some work critical data that would have cost her months of time) and it’s saved me countless hours when upgrading hard drives and such in my Media Center. Best of all, it’s piece of mind and I value that a lot.

BTW, they key about Windows Home Server is that you don’t have to think about what to backup and what not to backup. Traditional backup solutions have you deciding what to save and what not to save. Windows Home Server just backs every dammed file up (minus temp files and such). You don’t bother to think about it, the entire computer is backed up such that if you rip the hard drive out and place a new one in, you can restore your computer to any machine state over the past 3 months). Is that cool or what? Not to mention it uses Single Instance store meaning that if a file exists on two machines it only stores one copy of it. That means that when you backup 6 machines running the same operating system, the os is only stored once on the server, not 6 times.

However, Home Server not a panacea. If your house burns down, or some one steals your Home Server, all your stuff goes with it. As such you need some kind of a backup for your backup strategy.

Well there are two ways to do this:

1. Remote backup to the cloud
2. Offsite backup

Remote backup to the cloud

Remote backup to the cloud is possible via KeepVault and Jungle Disk, both of which have Home Server add-ins that will copy your stuff to the cloud. The problem with both these services is that they are pretty inefficient. They don’t support block level backups (well Jungle Disk does via a $1 monthly addon). They also don’t support file renames or moves (if you move or rename a file it’s copied back to the server, and in the case of KeepVault they don’t even delete the old copy).

Why should you care about block level backups? Well lets say you have a photo that’s 6 MB. Now lets rate it or add a keyword. Well, now the file has changed by a tiny amount, yet it takes smart backup software to know this. Most software will just see that the file has changed and copy 6 MB up to the cloud.

This isn’t a big deal if we are talking about a single file. But we are talking about gigabytes of data (which I have), then this can seriously mess things up. It means that your bandwidth is getting hogged up by these apps, and the amount of time it takes to copy the changes to the cloud means that your changes are unprotected during this process. No good.

There are two other backup programs I have used that support block level backups, Mozy and Carbonite.

Unfortunately, neither of these are supported on Windows Home Server.

I currently use Carbonite after having started with it and then switching to Mozy for about a year. However, Mozy royally screwed up my backup at one point and my attempts to get them to help went unanswered so I dropped them and went back to Carbonite. Since then I’ve not had a problem. It just works and I don’t think about it (like my Home Server).

As I mentioned though, they don’t support Home Server. For me this isn’t a big deal though. I have a Windows Media Center PC which acts as a “Media Hub” with all my photos and videos. It also has Windows Live Sync (aka FolderShare) installed and all the stuff I use to Sync between my PCs gets backed up to the Media Center.

This ensures that:

1. all my files are backed up to Home Server (because the Home Server backs up the Media Center nightly)
2. all my files are backed up to the Cloud.

However, is this really practical for all your files? Well keep reading.

Offsite backup

I have also employed an Offsite backup strategy to complement my Cloud backup strategy. An offsite backup is actually what it sounds like. You keep your stuff not at your house.

However, today I got a gizmo that literally makes this a turnkey solution for me.

Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 has a feature that lets you backup your Home Server shares using the built in software. All you do is plug in a USB drive and select which shares you want backed up.

Up until today I was using a desktop USB 500 GB drive to do this and I would take it to work. However, this proved to be a bit of a pain in the neck. It meant that I need to lug around cables and a dreaded power brick. I HATE power bricks.

Anyway, this weekend while at Fry’s I noticed that Seagate makes an awesome little portable drive called the FreeAgent Go. It comes with a super cool dock that you can just leave plugged into your Home Server. Then you can get a couple of 500 GB portable drives that plug into the dock. The drives were selling for $109 (limit one per household) so I got one and plan to get another from Amazon.

Now I can keep one drive at home, and one at work. Once a month I will just swap the drives and it will ensure that I at least have an offsite backup of things like my 100 GB of my music and 200 GB of Movies and such so that I don’t have to rely on Cloud Backup for moving around that much data. If I ever lose a drive it’s also much faster to drive to work, grab 500 GB and drive home than it is to download that much data from the cloud.