RE: back-up drives and software
- From: "Chip Orange" <Corange@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 12:17:40 -0400
I bought a 250 gb network attached storage drive for my backups. This
attaches to your home LAN via ethernet rather than an individual pc via
USB. This makes it equally accessible from any number of pcs, running
any OS. It's even accessible from a laptop using WIFI to get on the
network. All as if it were any other networked pc, which means you can
even assign a drive letter to the network path so you can feel right at
home using it.
It's called SimpleShare from SimpleTech, and is available at Best Buy
among other places for around $300--$350.
I found a nice, shareware, backup utility from a company named Willow
Creek Software called Backup Made Simple (
http://www.willowsoft.com/backup/index.html )), and that's what I use.
XP comes with its own backup software I think as well, but you can use
whatever you wish with this kind of arrangement.
The software I chose creates the backup in windows dir format, not a
special proprietary format, so it's very easy to retrieve a single file.
It works on any version of Windows, and you can try before you buy.
The NAS drive itself is much like any of the external drives, except
that it has an ethernet jack, and 2 usb jacks as it will also act as a
print server. You control it via a web interface, like you would your
router, although for most folks there's nothing to control except maybe
setting the admin password and the MS workgroup name.
If you work in a small corporate environment, you could buy 2 of these,
swap them out once a week, and take one off site, and you'd have a great
disaster preparedness plan for very little money.
I use 100 mb ethernet, and find the speed quite acceptible. Even 10 mb
should be fine, as I don't think the external USB drives do any better
than that. The WIFI access speed is of course much less, and you
wouldn't want to do a full backup that way, but it's fine for moving
files around to/from it (which I do all the time as I use it as my large
offline vault since my laptop only holds 60 GB).
There is no recycle bin on this type of drive, as that is a windows only
feature, and this drive is designed to be used by any OS.
Hth,
Chip Orange
Database Administrator
Florida Public Service Commission
Chip.Orange@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(850) 413-6314
(Any opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not
necessarily reflect those of the Florida Public Service Commission.)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: jfw-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:jfw-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of ptusing@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2005 10:40 AM
> To: jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: back-up drives and software
>
> thanks to everyone! If some one finds a better back up
> system that works
> well with JAWS, please tell us all.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Bobcat" <bobcat11@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2005 12:46 AM
> Subject: Re: back-up drives and software
>
>
> > Western Digital has smaller external usb and firewire
> drives. They have
> > the
> > one touch option and use Retrospect.
> >
> > I just tried one out. I didn't keep it because I don't
> like Retrospect.
> > However, the drive was quiet and cool. It also would spin down
> > automatically. Another thing I didn't like is that I
> wasn't given better
> > instructions during installation. It is a good idea to make smaller
> > partitions depending on which version of Windows you have
> but I didn't
> > find
> > this out till I'd done a backup..
> >
> > --
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