My 85 year old MIL has decided she wants to keep her PC backed up. She’s goin’ strong, but is not so good at learning new things any more. So whatever I set up for her needs to be easy to operate, and ideally 100% hands off automatic for the backup side. I’m not concerned about how complicated restore is; I’ll be stuck doing that if the need arises.
It’s WinXP on a 5-ish year old Compaq commodity box with internet via cable. She’s got maybe 20GB of files and not much turnover. The goal is to protect against HD failure, not accidental deletion noticed months later. So we don’t need a complex differential or archiving approach, just a snapshot taken every so often.
I’m in IT, but don’t much deal with backup. My personal machine has a cmd file I made eons ago which copies some files to a big thumb drive every six months or so when I happen to think of running it.
At work the guys in the basement just make it all happen.
Bottom line: MIL thinks I’m the guru of backup, but I got no clue. What’s easy, ideally cheap, and works well for you?
Easiest would probably be one of the online backup programs like Mozy. It looks like their cost is only $5 a month, and the software does all of the work for you, just like the guys in the basement.
Note that I haven’t used their service, nor anyone else’s, so I’m just going by what they have on their web site.
I use Mozy as one of my backup plans. It works as advertised but she will need to leave her computer on to have it work on a schedule. The first backup takes a rrreeaallyyy long time to upload as in the better part of a week if you back up everything but the nightly or weekly uploads after that are very fast. You can always use your computer while it is working and it doesn’t slow it down. In the event of disaster, you have choices of how to get your data back from online retrieval which takes time to having DVD’s burned and shipped to you. That takes some no how but hopefully she won’t ever need to use it.
An external hard drive is another good choice. They usually cost less than $80 or so now and the newer ones are small and USB powered. You just plug them into your computer and copy what you want onto them. A full image can be done in an hour or two but you really shouldn’t leave it in the same place as the computer if that is the only backup.
I use Jungle Disk, which is Amazon’s answer to Mozy, with the info backed up on Amazon’s servers (or Rackspace, if you prefer.) Cost is about the same. I think an offline back up is probably your best choice for documents and photos. I assume she doesn’t have loads of music or videos to back up? She tell her to leave it on for a few days while the back up happens (or take it home with you and do the initial upload there.) After that, it all happens behind the scenes and the files are offsite in case the machine has a meltdown.
If she has less than 2gb of stuff, dropbox might be a viable choice. I don’t know how much stuff your mom has on her machine.
I use ClickFree. It doesn’t even come with instructions because all you do is take it out of the box and plug in the USB. It does everything else hands free.
My question is…what is she looking to back up? If it’s just things like documents. The thing I would recommend is SyncToys. Free from Microsoft. You’d have to set it all up for her, but after that it’s very easy. Insert a USB stick* start SyncToys, and hit Go.
If you want to leave out the USB stick part. Either keep it permanently attached to an unused USB port or get an external (or even internal) hard drive to back up to. But I’m a fan of having my backup medium not physically attached the the computer (or an outlet) between backups.