With today’s technology there is great emphasis on media creation and files are getting larger by the minute. Even the kids’ music players are recording video. This media is often also irreplaceable. As I always say, “If it’s not in at least two places it might as well not exist.” Backup is imperative, but where to put it all.
In this post I would like to talk about whole house backup. There are many solutions both local and in the cloud for individual machines, but what about the kids and other machines in the house that store valuable one of a kind information. If you pay a subscription fee for online backup you need to get one for each machine or buy enough space to hold it all.  If you have a large centralized backup location in the home or office then everyone can copy their stuff to their own folder on that space.  If you still need off site backup to quench any paranoia for a natural disaster wiping out both your source computer and the backup because they are in the same location then you can  purchase just one subscription for the whole house because technically you only have one device to backup.
The central storage would have to be on all the time, so not everyone can use a computer unless they are going to leave it on.  There are also devices now that are basically hard drives that connect to your home network.  These can be left on all the time and hopefully go to sleep when not in use.  These devices usually come with some software to load on all the machines in the house to automate the process of copying the files to the central backup.  You can also use other software like Norton 360 which has a backup feature built in.  You can pick important folders like My Documents, Pictures, Music, and Videos.  The software can be set to run daily or weekly to copy the files to the backup.   The files on the central storage device can be accessed from all of the devices on your network so when one of your computers is down or in the shop you can access its backed up files from one of the other computers on the network with ease.  If you ever had to recover from a system crash you would just have to reinstall whatever backup program you were using, like Norton 360, and then tell it to restore from the central device.
A note about backing up programs.   Most windows programs need to be installed from their original media and can not be simply copied to a backup source and copied back.   The installation media places files in multiple locations within windows along with letting the system know about any special configurations need and registers custom code libraries to run the program if needed.  If you would like to backup the programs along with your files I recommend creating an ‘image’ of your system and storing it on the central device.   An image is a snapshot of your entire computer and works like those discs a computer manufacturer uses to ‘restore’ your system.   The image would take your entire system back to the moment you created the snapshot.  This is an excellent backup because if your system were to crash you could take it from blank to fully operational with all your programs, data, and settings by restoring from your image.   To accomplish this you only need to get better software like Norton Ghost or Acronis Backup.  I recommend still backing up your files to the central location in case you just need a few things recovered without wiping your system back to a previous date.  You can set your new image making software to make a snapshot maybe once a month or manually make a snapshot every time you install a new application. Place this image file on the central backup drive for safe keeping.  Remember these whole system images will be enormous in size containing everything on your main drive in your computer.   Your central backup will have to have twice the size of each main hard drive you will be backing up.   So if you have 4 machines with 250GB hard drives then you should get at least 2TB for your central backup to be sure you have plenty of space to copy everything.  In the past I only used system images for creating my own ‘system recovery’ set after installing windows, drivers, and my initial applications when building a new machine.   Now that huge drives are dirt cheap I can finally attempt to make an image of my current configurations.  I will let you know how it goes.

Here are some links:
Norton 360

Norton Ghost

Acronis True Image

Seagate GoFlex Network Attached Storage

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