Friday, 16 February 2007

Its time to split up the herd!

Regular readers will know of my shiny new pair of buffalo, that are the basis of my new image backup solution. They are set up so that one backs the other up every night.

It struck me that having them next to each other was probably not a good idea as fire, theft and other disasters are likely to wipe out both in one go, thus completely negating the point of the backups.

So I decide to move the backup drive as far as possible away from the main drive. Now I could have run Cat5 cabling across the house and down a floor but that would involve a lot of disruption and even (heaven forbid) ..decorating!

I decided to take advantage of my wireless network and use that to connect up the second Linkstation to the network. I got hold of a Belkin 802.11g Wireless Client Bridge



All I had to do switch it on, and tell my wireless network about it, then it was up and running perfectly. I plugged the second Linkstation in to it and I now have a backup which is reasonably remote from the main system.

Having sorted out data and backups I found I had 2 external USB drives that weren't being used any more. This is where the Buffalo solution comes in handy again as I have plugged one of these drives in to the second Linkstation, to provide another remote backup drive for email & documents.

Unfortunately connecting a USB drive to the Linkstation requires you to reformat it otherwise the Linkstation can't share it out. But once I had, I set it up as a backup target for my documents and emails using a simple xcopy batchfile.

In addition I have used Norton Ghost V10 to take an image of the boot disk of each PC which should make recovery of those PCs much simpler.

As for the last drive I have dumped all my images down to it (they just about fit into 250GB at the moment) and I will store this round my parents house to give me a remote backup.

Finally I am happy that I have a full backup solution...hurrah!

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