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Most people don't have any sort of back up, for us superusers do in one form or another.

But I bet most of us don't have an off-site backup. Meaning while its nice we can survive a single hard drive failure, we don't have any backup for fire or if a jumbo jet landed on your house.

I've been trying to setup off-site backup for a while now, and there are a lot of nice online solutions. But the problem is I don't have any upload bandwidth left (all setup for bit-torrent) and I generate a lot of new data.

I've come up with the idea of putting a external enclosure at work and buying a 2.5" 250 GB hard drive USB drive as means for transport. The drive would be carried back and forth and act as a sneaker network.

But I don't want to manage the data manually. I want software to automagically copy the new changes and files and update the external enclosure at work. Does such software exist?

Anybody else in my situation?

EDIT

Ok here's some more information. This is secondary back up. I already do a back up, I just want the external enclosure at work to mirror my backup.

You can get USB adapters for 2.5" drives so they'll show my as an external drive. I should have just said a USB drive or something. That would have been less confusing.

Pyrolistical
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4 Answers4

3

Buy two external hard drives. Keep one at home and one somewhere else. Synchronize your computer regularly to the one you keep at home. Swap the hard drives regularly, e.g., every month.

Vebjorn Ljosa
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Private network or leased network bandwidth is one option if you have $$$ or business network. If you are just a user, then things can be more simple.

Is this your primary backup or secondary backup for off site storage?

You would want the software to write a copy to another hard drive at the same time. Where are you current backups stored? You could write a script to copy that to the external hard drive. You could also do some raid 1 enclosure and have the data written to two drives at once.

I cannot recommend software packages as I have not used many of them. I just use time machine at home for my regular backups.

Troggy
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It sounds like you're basically asking about backup software that you can schedule, or is "always on". I'm not sure about software that would essentially mirror the drives/folders you want though - a quick google for "mirror software" got me this program which does "real time" backups.

Community
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patjbs
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If I understand the question, you are willing to move the drive to work manually, but you don't want to have to remember which files changed, right?

The simple solution is something like Microsoft SyncToy 2.0. You can set this up to automatically synchronize your data with the external drive. Every time you take it home you can run the sync toy script and everything on the drive will look like the data on the home machine. Then you can bring it back to work for storage.

Steve Rowe
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