Out of Pod Experience

First a bit of background. I don't have a full system backup. My out of the box HP (hpe-240f) has a section of the hard drive partitioned with a factory image, but that's it. I have a few pictures and things saved to my PC and a flash drive. A little over a year ago I was copying files, mostly school and family photos, from a Lexar flash drive to my PC when suddenly the flash drive died. About a third of the files transferred. I lost a lot of stuff.

So I've been thinking more seriously over time of setting up a backup that's something more than a few GB on a flash drive. This is my network...

Motorola Cable Modem -> Linksys AC1200 (EA6100) connects wirelessly to -> PC, 2 laptops (1 personal, 1 work), 2 smartphones (Nokia Lumia 521s), 2 3DSs, PS3, Wii, Wii U. A camera gets backed up to the PC when its SD card fills up via the PC's SD card reader.

Here are the options I'm aware of...

1) Buy an extra HDD, install it in the PC, use it as a backup. If the primary drive dies, I have the secondary.
2) Same as above but with an EHDD.
3) Buy an EHDD, set up the backup, and store it at my folk's place (they live close).
4) Build a cheap NAS and store it at my folk's place.

3 and 4 interest me most because they would also protect against theft or any catastrophic disaster i.e. fire, flood, weather, etc. The problem with 3 and 4 is I'm not exactly sure how to manage the logistics of keeping the backup up to date (at very minimum once a month, most preferable is at least once a week) with minimal driving back and forth. I'm not sure if I could do this remotely because Comcast caps me at 300GB/mo and automatically charge 10 USD for every 50GB after that.

I'm also not sure how to effectively set up a backup. When I used a flash drive, I made a file on the PC that matched the flash drive and drag and dropped files into the flash drive. I made sure the flash drive and PC matched up and were current. Aside from other personal data, I bought my PC prebuilt, so I don't have a copy of Windows to do a clean install if something goes wrong. Can I make a backup of Windows to reinstall in case something goes wrong?


What's the best way to go about this?

What you want to do is 4) twice or more.

This is what you need to do.

1) Learn FreeNAS.
2) Fall in love with ZFS
3) Build a NAS, with server grade components with at least 16GB of RAM for Raid2z and use proper hard drives.
4) Make pancakes?

My setup is basically one locally and one offsite. If you configure your NAS to run a personal cloud, you can download files from it to your phone.

Never put SSDs in a NAS for any other purpose than L2ARC (cache). There are no performance benefits from doing so and you are likely going to get bottlenecked by the chipset inside. It will also be bottlenecked by the gigabit ethernet because gigabit is still not mainstream even if I do run a gigabit LAN.

What would you like to know?

Most of my research is coming from watching youtube videos and reading this article from Anandtech. To me, it seems like making a backup is as simple as copying one file to another location. In my case, that's usually been a flash drive.

The Anand article lays out two requirements for something to be a back up. 1) The data must be duplicated, and 2) you have to be able to go back to an earlier time. The first is a given for me. I feel like I take the second for granted though.

So lets say I keep doing what I currently do, and my computer gets a virus. I still have those few files, but I don't have anyway to restore my entire computer to a pre-virus state.

Anyway, I'm reading up on stuff. For now, this is what I'm doing.
-I've made two (in case I lose one) repair discs using the Windows 7 utility. Is the repair disc specific to my PC, or will it work on any other 64-bit Windows 7 PC?
-My wife has a 1TB Fantom Drive GreenDrive (eSATA and USB2.0 connections). I thought I'd use that for now to make a system image back up of my PC, but it was initially formatted on her Mac laptop, so my PC can read it. I'm reading for a way around that.
-When the external HDD is able to be used freely between the Macs and PCs in my house, I'll make a back up, then organize data on my PC using the libraries Windows 7 has.



It's seems a bit overwhelming.

That WD 4TB My "Cloud" Personal Storage is really just cachy marketing for an external HDD and NIC package with blings. It's a portable NAS. Its biggest advantage is plug & play convenience for the less nerdy.
If the HDD inside fails, you're still SOL. To have better redundancy, you probably need 2x of them. The std portable HDD does the same thing, certainly cheaper without the extra blings.
Or ... you could hack it together for pizza money, but only if you're technically inclined or have hardware knowledge.

Building a portable mirror RAID (i.e. RAID 1*) box is easier nowadays with the micro ATX form factor. Essentially, a mini-PC which can be expanded into various functions if/when neeeded.
I'd personally go this route if I aim to keep a backup of a backup for my important data. If you're paranoid about the geo redundancy, then the issue isn't really about the box ... it's your internet capping.
Also, plug & play solutions for RAID1 exist. One Google sample - http://www.newertech.com/storage/

*RAID10, imo, is unecessary and costly for personal backups ... but if you've got the cash to splurge ...

Nothing shady here. I have a new son and my wife has taken more pictures during his short life than I have during my entire life. I've also been ready about things like ransomware and other malware and it really freaks me out. Also, there have been 3 burglaries in the apartment complex I live. I'm hardcore paranoid about this now.

So far I've got a ~half full 1TB formatted HFS external HDD. It's acting as storage for my wife's MacBook. I want to put all that stuff on my PC, reformat the HFS eHDD to FAT32 or exFAT if her Mac OS (OS X 10.5.8 Leopard) will support it. That should let me use that drive freely between Mac and PC for read/writing.

Initially, I hooked up the eHDD to the MacBook and tried transferring the files through my wireless network. It estimated ~110hrs to transfer ~410GB. I literally don't have that long as I'll be out of town soon.

I tried to transfer the files directly from the eHDD to the PC using HFSExplorer. The eHDD was connected to the PC via USB, powered and turned on, and I even saw it on the Device Manager, but HFSExplorer failed to find it.

I tried a direct ethernet connection between PC and MacBook according to this video, but that didn't seem to work. The estimated file transfer time was about the same as when I first tried to trsanfer the files wirelessly. hen I turned off the wireless on the MacBook, the file transfer stopped. To verify the wired connection was working on the MacBook, I turned off the wireless connection and opened an internet browser. That worked. Curiously, speedtest.net reported practically identical DL and UL speeds when the MacBook was wired and wireless, and wireless in different areas of the apartment.

Now I've got the eHDD hooked up to the MacBook, powered and turned on, and the MacBook itself is plugged in to the wall and router, and wireless is turned off. I don't have an ethernet cable long enough to reach the PC (and stay out of reach of the baby), but I figured at least have one point of transfer on a wired connection would help somewhat. It reports a time slightly less than totally wireless, but still ~80hrs. So far so good.

Hopefully this is a lot less painful when the eHDD is formatted in a way that lets PC and Mac read/write to it (FAT32 or exFAT.) After this we'll see about bothering to keep the MacBook or replace it with a Windows laptop.