backup for insurance agent

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syn3rgyz

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My aunt is an insurance agent. She has a 4 year old PC that only uses IDE.
She has asked me to setup some sort of backup system for her, this is my first time doing this sort of thing and I'm not quite sure how to approach it. She wants a hard drive to store and backup her work documents(info on all her client). She also wants a separate harddrive to store her own personal stuff (pictures, videos from social events).

I'm thinking of upgrading her computer to support sata and ordering 4x 1tb sata drives.
- two of them are going to be internal, one for work one for personal.
- and two more will be for backup of work and personal which will be put into enclosures so it can be taken home from office.

The problems I'm thinking of include
- if i'm doing incremental and differential backup would it take a long time to the point where if she wanted to go home and take the enclosures with her she would have to wait a long time for the backup to finish?
- would going the usb 2.0 route to backup two drives be too slow and affect overall system performance? if so would usb 3.0 be better?
- what program should i use to set up scheduled backups?
- how should i approach creating a backup image of the computer itself and where should i store that image?
 
An external hardrive still has the problem of being in the same location if something catches on fire. Has she looked into any of the offsite backup solutions, granted those usually require a small subscription fee but it might be a worthwhile buisness expense for her. I know my parents use carbonite for their businesses but I think there are some other options out there.

The amount of time it takes to backup everything will be largely dependant on how much data she has to back up. If she is backing up 4 gigs then USB2 would be fine, if she is backing up 400gigs you might want usb3. However, if you want USB3 on a computer that old you will need to get a card that supports it.
 
syn3rgyz said:
The problems I'm thinking of include
- if i'm doing incremental and differential backup would it take a long time to the point where if she wanted to go home and take the enclosures with her she would have to wait a long time for the backup to finish?
- would going the usb 2.0 route to backup two drives be too slow and affect overall system performance? if so would usb 3.0 be better?
- what program should i use to set up scheduled backups?
- how should i approach creating a backup image of the computer itself and where should i store that image?
Click to expand...

1) Yeah, as far as the incremental backups it depends on how much data is being added or changed between backup cycles. I'm guessing that for this situation, there won't be a huge amount of files being added or changed between cycles and if they are, they will be smaller files. Therefore I would not think that incremental backups will take very long.

2) USB 2.0 should be able to handle those incremental backups without forcing her to wait a long time for the backup to complete. Again, in order to know for sure, we need to know how much data is changing on a daily or weekly basis.

3) Is she willing to pay for the backup software?

4a) If so, there are many programs available for commercial use that will make daily/weekly/whatever images of the OS drive and send it to another internal hard drive, an external enclosure, a network location, etc. Acronis and Paragon come to mind, but there are many others.

4b) If not, you could use a free drive cloning utility like Easeus Disk Copy to clone the IDE hard drive to a SATA drive. This will put the OS and program files on one of the SATA disks and keep everything as it was. Then once you verify that the PC is booting to SATA drive "A" with no problem, clone that drive to another one of the SATA drives (SATA drive "B"). Put SATA drive B in an external enclosure and use free file sync software like SyncToy or FreeFileSync to copy any new/changed files to the external drive. This way if drive "A" dies, you can simply take drive "B" out of the enclosure and boot to it with the recent files intact. Have her get into the habit of running the sync operation just before she disconnects the drive to take home.

There are many ways of accomplishing what she wants to do, so it's just a matter of deciding what is best (hopefully this thread will help with that).

@TheGreySpectre: you have a good point about an offsite or online backup service protecting the data from fire or other disasters, but he did say she plans to take the enclosures home. If she doesn't want to pay for a good offsite solution, she will have to be willing to take the enclosures home every night to keep the data physically separated and just make that part of her routine.

Offsite would be optimal, since if there is a fire at the office she may not have time to grab the enclosure, but it's not free...I have no idea if she is willing to pay to make this backup solution happen, and if so, how much OP?
 
Depending on how much you want to spend and how much data you have I suggest the boys at rsync.net
They have a Windows app that's based off of SuperFlexibleFileSync and it's quite nifty. Easy to setup - if I were you I'd set it to do backups every 12 hours (since rsync is incremental)
I agree about the part doing 4x1tb drives. 2 internal and 2 external right?
 
How much data does she have? How much is changed each day?

2TB hard drives cost less per byte than 1TB hard drives.

---

I back up 35GB of data in about 2hours over a USB 2 connection (full backup). Nightly backups take under 10 minutes.

But how much you need to back up makes a big difference in what a good solution looks like.
 
i would buy her mozy or carbonite or crashplan and be done with it.

for business you need offsite
 
Thanks for all the excellent replies / suggestions, here are answer to some of your questions
-she tells me that she has below 100gb of data stored so far for work so I think 1tb drive should be enough. I don't plan to keep the IDE drives, I plan to migrate them over to the new desktop using SATA. Then I'm going to format the IDE drives with the old desktop and her secretary is going to use it.
-I'm sure there will be a lot changed each day, but the size of the files being changed should be quite small (don't know if this makes sense)
-I was thinking of using online backup, (I'm pretty sure she wouldn't mind paying anything below $50 a month) but I'm not sure whether her company would allow client information to be stored with a 3rd party and even if they do I'm not sure if shes comfortable with that. I was wondering if taking her enclosures home after work is a sufficient off site solution, but if she takes it home, i can't schedule backups to be done while shes not in the office after work. Other issues including what if she goes out to lunch and theres a fire? should she take her enclosure with her every time she leaves the office? (shes has to go out a lot during the day to meet up with clients)

Another noobie question I have is if she takes home her "personal data" enclosure and makes changes to it, and she brings it to work the next day would the files on the enclosure and the desktop sync up or would it just revert back to whats on the desktop since the enclosure is designated as backup?

She asked me for an estimate of around how much it would cost. I told her around $500 and that I'm still not quite sure yet. I was considering going to NAS route at first, but just the NAS itself is around $300 so I decided against that.
 
http://rsync.net/

Open Standards, Common Sense.

Simple, live, offsite filesystem for business continuity and disaster recovery.

* – Backup/Restore/Browse on Windows/Mac/Unix
* – SAS 70 / PCI / SOX / HIPAA Compliant
* – Encrypted backups, snapshots, IPV6, sshFS
* – rsync, ftp/sftp/scp, rdiff-backup, WebDAV...
* – SVN / Git / MySQL/Postgres/Exchange/SQL
Click to expand...
They allow unlimited clients and unlimited bandwidth, they just meter it at 5mbps I think, give or take a few mbit. You could run it at the office and do (OFFICE)->(RSYNC.NET) and run it at home and do (RSYNC.NET)->(HOME).
The Windows backup utility also does ZIP + ENCRYPTION. I personally don't utilize those features because I have hundreds of thousands of files and I prefer the transfers to only do incremental (ie: files that have changes). I do my transfers using the SSH option. NEVER DO FTP IT IS PLAINTEXT PASSWORDS!

Fuck the idea of taking an enclosure with you. Computers should make life easier not harder.
 
cafcwest said:
fixed.


Try restoring a hundred GB of data quickly that is backed up "in the cloud"
Click to expand...

Yeah you call your backup provider and they'll overnight you harddrives with the information on it for a fee which you either negotiated when you started the contract, or you pay right then and there (if they are feeling nice lol :()
 
okay lets just say she doesn't want to go the cloud storage option. Since she only has DSL and she shares an office and the internet with some other ppl, and if the router/internet goes out she can't backup / retrieve anything. Even if I recommend her to use online storage, I would use it as the primary and only backup.
 
syn3rgyz said:
okay lets just say she doesn't want to go the cloud storage option. Since she only has DSL and she shares an office and the internet with some other ppl, and if the router/internet goes out she can't backup / retrieve anything. Even if I recommend her to use online storage, I would use it as the primary and only backup.
Click to expand...

You should never even consider off-site as your primary. Off-site is for backups only (and make sure you test and make a small document of how to recover files). Its super easy. Don't make this a bigger problem than it has to be :)

Buy 2 external hard drives (or two internal whatever). Put 1 in the office and one at home. Put rsync.net windows app on both pcs and tell them to do one way backup to the server, then one way backup to the home. Now you've got you're data at home and at off-site. Even if her city gets nuked she'll have her data in california or whatever. You can even pick Zurich Switzerland.
 
^ that actually sounds okay, but they charge like $.80/ gb/month and as low as $.32, if lets say she has 500gb of data later on, thats going to be like $400 a month?? or am I wrong about that?

i'd still like to know whats the best way to implement it without using the cloud, for educational purposes and just to give her an extra option to choose from.
 
1) cloud is vague but does not apply in many categories. rsync.net has freebsd raid 6 boxes I think, not cloud in the sense of "the cloud"
I would *never* trust "cloud" storage for something I think reliability. At least not in the next few years anyways -- you want to use very universal (LOL UFS GET IT) technologies which are proven and stable, save you headaches later on
2) Yeah you could get very expensive if you are storing lots of stuff. Be wary of any company that says "unlimited" anything -- because think about it - that means as you grow you're becoming their ENEMY. They have profit in interest to make sure people use as LITTLE of their "unlimited" services as possible. This includes ANYTHING and EVERYTHING. There is no free lunch
3) You can download SyncBack (freeware) and fuck around with it. I use that program to do transfers (backup AND sync) between lots of local places. I am lucky that my main data is under 100gb. That means gigabit transfers are very fast and afterwards I can use wireless-n for any changes (on a daily basis less than 1gb is altered). Because I have under 100gb of data, it is no problem for me to save copies EVERYWHERE. I have our "data" "backedup" every day (or night 3am actually) to all the different PCs in the office and to my laptop which I take home everyday. If I don't have to include Windows boxes than RSYNC is GOD. Especially their differential transmission stuff.
I used to pay for a dedicated host from a company in downtown Houston. My idea was if something major were to happen at least I could drive to the 'datacenter' in downtown and pull my hard drive from the server. One day my dedicated box went down and it didn't come up, so after the 2nd hour I drove to the tower and asked to see my server, turns out it was a two-bit operation, both of the "managers" had real jobs as IT guys and there was no one at the facility! They had forgotten to pay their bill whom they rent space from!!! You really gotta evaluate your options in detail! If I were charging you for this advice I'd also tell you to make backups of your backups and use multiple various companies with multiple datacenters around the world. :)
 
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