I was talking with a guy who was telling me I should build a cheap WHS box for backing up all my PC's. Would using a program like Acronis or Norton for backing up to my unraid be comparable to a WHS box? He was saying how easy it is to restore from WHS.

 

Sent from my SGH-T989 using Tapatalk

I believe Acronis is. But could be more expensive than a whs solution depending on number of computers.

 

Sent from my SGH-I727R using Tapatalk

Right now I'm using Acronis Backup and Recovery with unRAID to backup my boxes every night.  It works, but I wouldn't enthusiastically recommend it.  I have very little confidence in Acronis.  At least the quality of their business-class product (Backup and Recovery) seems to be declining.  Their consumer products are getting more and more features, although I've never used them.

 

I wanted to just use Windows 7's built-in backup capabilities, but it has one huge drawback- you can't do differential backups over a network.  You can only do full backups to network locations.  That doesn't work well if you want to do nightly/regular backups.  I was also looking for something that let me exclude certain folders from the backup.  You can do that with the Acronis products.  More generally, the built-in Windows 7 backup utility is pretty limited. 

 

If I had to do it over again, I'd probably consider ShadowProtect Desktop more seriously.  It's pretty expensive though.

I have 5 PC's to back up as of now. One of them I was going to convert to a WHS and use a few if the 2tb from my unraid which I want to replace with 3tb.

 

Sent from my SGH-T989 using Tapatalk

I simply created an image of all my machines using Acronis and stored them on my unRAID machine.

I keep all my files on unRAID anyways so if my machine dies well so be it. I'll just restore my machine and carry on. or in one case it was more cost effective to buy a new machine and move on.

It is $80 for Acronis on 3 pc's.

You can't beat Crashplan service. They NEVER delete files and you have every version of a file it ever backed up. I'm running the client on 5 computer's and can't tell it is ever there. Being that it is a service makes it very nice. One thing I LOVE about it, I don't EVER have to worry about anything being backed up or not. I've tried the local, ghost, acronis and all that...nothing is easier then Crashplan.

Well I ordered a new htpc case for my living and will be doing some pc building next week. I plan on taking out mobo and processor of a cheap Emachine AMD x2 220 and putting it in a new case and new psu with home server installed. I am also thinking of using crashplan as a second back up source.

So I could get crashplan family + unlimited for only $6 a month. I could use it for all pc's in household and could I get it working Unraid. That would be an awesome deal.

So I could get crashplan family + unlimited for only $6 a month. I could use it for all pc's in household and could I get it working Unraid. That would be an awesome deal.

 

It's only $6/month if you pay for it 4 years at a time.  But, yes, CrashPlan+ Family Unlimited works great. Ive been using for about a year now. I have 4 PCs in my house, plus my parents PC at their house, and my unRAID all backing up to CrashPlan's servers.

I would recommend both crashplan and acronis

 

Because,

 

Acronis can make hdd image backups where restoring the computer in case of a hdd crash is very easy. But the file size is huge, takes a long time, etc.

 

Crashplan is great for backing up certain folders, such as documents, desktop, etc. but it's not really for restoring the entire hdd including the OS. (You can technically select the entire hard drive to be backed up with crashplan, but then every time windows changes files on your system, which is a lot, your computer will be rsyncing and uploading to their servers, etc. it would be a waste of processing power and bandwidth)

 

So I recommend doing daily or more frequent backups with crashplan (certain folders selected), and doing maybe monthly or weekly full image backups with acronis. That way, if the hdd crashes, you can do a full system restore with acronis (which might be a month old) and then restore certain folders with crashplan

Maybe I will get crashplan only for my server. I do not keep too many files I need backed up on my PC's.

 

Would a windows home server back up files and also be easy to restore an os?

Sent from my SGH-T989 using Tapatalk

So I recommend doing daily or more frequent backups with crashplan (certain folders selected), and doing maybe monthly or weekly full image backups with acronis. That way, if the hdd crashes, you can do a full system restore with acronis (which might be a month old) and then restore certain folders with crashplan

 

That is exactly what I do.  My only gripe is that running a full image backup over wifi on my laptop's 500 GB hard drive takes days...which means that recovering that image would also take days.  I should have a hardwired connection available to speed it up, but I don't at the moment.  I'm also a bit confused as to how Acronis's differential imaging works - I think it is just updating the image with any changes, but I'm not entirely sure, and they don't give you any easy way to look at your backup.  SpeedFan just identified some end to end smart errors on my laptop's hard drive, so I guess I'll find out soon how well the recovery from the whole disk image actually works!

 

By the way, I picked up a single-user license of Acronis from Newegg for free after a rebate (paid $25 up front, got $25 after a MIR rebate).  Can't complain about that!

I hate to admit. that WHS's PC back up is one of the few products Microsoft got right.

I have set up dozens of WHS servers for people and use it myself.

 

I have the advantage of using Acronis at my job....we pretty much deploy it with every install

Although I use a version that is a couple of versions ago because they stopped providing licenses to dealers it works great

even the universal restore has worked fantastic....I don't know how often you would need to restore an image to different hardware in a home environment but if you do it works

+1 crashplan