the Design Experience Weblog Archive

I could have connected a USB hard drive to one of the machines and shared but, but this seemed to be a little messy. I did not want any one machine to keep all the backups so this meant an addition piece of hardware. Enter the Network Attached Storage. Once only available to those with big budgets, a self contained network storage server is available for around $150 these days. A member of my local LUG, sympathetic to my plight, with an overabundance of spare hardware, provided me with a SimpleTech SimpleShare NAS box. Ths fortified I dove into the realm of cross-platform backup.

A quick search turned up many options, some that include a server component. Since I wanted my system to not depend on another CPU, I wanted something simpler. The ubitquous rsync to the rescue. First I used Backup like an expert with rsync which provides the bare minimum to understand and get started with rsync. This worked great on OS X and Linux, but what about Windows?

Enter cwRsync. A distribution and installer for cygwin and rsync. It automated getting cygwin and rsync installed, which can be a pain with the standard cygwin installer. cwRsync also includes a sample batch file that is easily edited to get you going. I added a scheduled task and now I can backup Windows as well.

There are many many backup options, Bacula which is cross platform, but requires a server; DeltaCopy which is an rsync like system for Windows, but it also has a server component. I think Bacula would be great in a business environment to run a centralized backup server, but it was overkill for my home network.

So it's not that hard. In fact, the SimpleShare comes with backup software for Windows and Mac OS X for those who don't want to hack shell scripts so there is no excuse. Go now, and get yourself a backup solution.