I have a healthy fear of losing our (Mrs LikeFood and my) digital life. This stems from a time is the far distant past when I accidentally deleted all of Mrs LikeFoods tax records, work docs, billing records and much more after simultaneously formatting our old computer and the back up external hard drive that was plugged into it while attempting to create a media server for the garage. You can imagine the scene….

That story alone may give an insight into my IT skills.

Our current stimulation is now multifaceted and confusing (and so in my mind open to more disasters) so I’m looking to streamline it. It consists of a) a Synology NAS with 2x1TB HD that my brother in law set up and I don’t really understand that makes backups of our laptop (our only PC) and apparently also backs them up to my other brother in laws NAS via the web b) a ~£5 monthly subscription to iDrive that backs up the laptop too c) some files saved on Dropbox c) the (very) occasional image of the PC to an external hard drive,

One of the problems is that the PC hard drive isn’t big enough for all the photos/videos we have of family life without slowing to a crawl, so they are saved on the NAS somewhere, but I now can’t see them via Picasa so it seems pretty pointless to have them.

Reading this back it’s confusing to me, so probably won’t make sense to anyone. Getting brother in law to explain NAS setup is now not possible due to both the complexities of family life and his helpful but confusing nature of making things very complicated.

With things spread around I don’t know for sure where everything is, and that makes me nervous and makes it pointless to have stuff, like photos and video, if I can’t find them.

In my mind the laptop would have day to day files saved on it which would be backed up to the NAS. The NAS would be like a LikeFood mini-cloud that would have most stuff on it and it would get backed up to the proper cloud. Would this work? How would I manage this so there weren’t double copies of stuff, or things got lost accidentally?

If you really want to keep things simple, maybe just pay for a Dropbox subscription (80 quid for the year), you’d get 1TB of data and 30 days of version history in case you accidentally delete anything. Stick everything on there.

A local backup and a cloud backup is a nice idea (I use Apple TimeMachine to a NAS for local, then Arq to Amazon S3 for remote) but may be a bit of a faff to setup and maintain if you want to keep it simple.

What I do is copy everything I want to keep to an external hard disk, no complicated NAS solutions. I then take it to my mother’s for safekeeping. Voila, simple, cheap off-site backups.

One thing to bear in mind with cloud backup is that a regular ADSL connection is much slower upstream; as an example, my download speed is around 12Mbps, but upload is less than 1Mbps. According to my back-of-an-envelope calculations, uploading 1Tb of data would take me about three months.

Microsoft has just made their cloud thing (OneDrive?) unlimited storage…..

Christ, how long will it take to upload that? (-:

It sounds like you are ok if your pc/laptop are both being backed up to your NAS which is then in turn backing itself up to your brother in laws NAS (who I presume doesn’t live in he same house as you)

Christ, how long will it take to upload that?

and where would they put it all?

I use BackBlaze, and a local back up. BackBlaze is about £3.50 ($5) a month for a single PC, unlimited data storage. I have fibre though & as Cougar mentions above, using an online backup service over ADSL would take forever!

You could probably use an old PC, install Linux+CrashPlan and do back ups to that?

http://www.code42.com/crashplan/

I use Backblaze as well as Timemachine on a mac. Works fine for me

This is all very well, but will the technology still be available in 50 years to view these pictures, which I assume you are leaving to your children in the will ?

What you really need to do is have them copied onto microfiche and stored in a warehouse at a constant 10 degrees. With another copy stored in a fire-proof safe at a distance of at least 17 miles.

Its the only way to be sure….

That’s already a not bad set up OP. I’d ditch the iDrive, the dropbox and the ad-hoc backing up from your laptop to an external drive if you want to remove duplication.

Ideally, you shouldn’t store any files at all on your laptop and just store it all on the NAS.

So your NAS has your laptop back up, and all of your photos, files etc.

Your NAS is backed up off site to your brothers house which is cool in the event that you somehow destroy the NAS, and both drives.

For convenience if your brother is a long way away, you might want to buy a large USB drive, attach it to the NAS and set up a regular back up to that drive.

It’s worth learning about your NAS as it is a powerful bit of kit. The Synology site has some good guides. For instance, there is a service called Photo Station which you can set up. Then you can access it at home via your web browser – I think you can link Picasa/Flickr to it as well.

There is also a Photo Station app for phones which you can set to auto upload any photos you take on your phone to your NAS as well.

hth.

i just have two external drives and use time machine on the mac. One stays connected more or less constantly, the other one i back up about once a month and store it offsite at my office. Works for me…

Mac backups using time machine to Time Capsule (external Mac HD) is in the house, and external portable HD (Western Digital MyPassport) left at my inlaws.

@ everyone. Thanks for the advice, really appreciate it.

@hels. 🙂 that’s something I worry about, not so much for grandchildren to see, but for me to re-watch the video of the first time Charlie (aka micro-LikeFood) rode his bike etc. microfiche it is, plus a huge fresco on the ceiling somewhere should do it.

@ thebunk. I think you are right, no more avoiding the issue. Normally I’m an ‘address the issue and learn how to overcome it’ type of person, time to stop avoiding the NAS in the corner!

@ cougar. I have fibre with unlimited uploads ( I live in ‘Fastershire’ no less) so am not too worried about upload speeds.

@ bamboo. No, he lives a long way away so it’s safe from that perspective. I guess it comes back to thebunks point about knowledge. I’m not sure I could get the files off his NAS if needed (he’s not the BIL who set everything up and he’s as clueless as me)

Brilliant. I post a question that’s been keeping me awake, go do a lap of Penmachno, come back and there’s lots of help. Once again, cheers 🙂