I do the same. I was ready to buy a new printer, wireless access point, NAS, etc. ($700+) Then I realized, I don’t really need any of it, and even better, what I already have (but wasn’t using) is way more general purpose and thus flexible for my whims.

Automating backups are definitely phase II of this project. However, both Stephanie and I run Windows on our respective computers, so I’m in search of some way to create a background process that transparently and periodically copies files from our machines across the network. Any ideas?

One suggestion I’ve heard is not to install anything on our Windows boxes, but rather configure our My Documents folders on Windows to be shareable, and then set up smbfs on the MiniITX with a cron job that periodically fetches the files from our machines and stores them on the external USB drive.

And yeah, once I installed Ubuntu using the alternate-install CD, I was off to the races. No problems at all.

I assume you’ve read Mark Pilgrim’s post about data backups? Thankfully I don’t have any digital video, so I can pretty much store all my digital detritus on one hard drive, but as it stands all my data currently exists only on that one laptop (minus any data hosted online: blog, photos, etc) which is a pretty big single point of failure. I would sleep easier knowing that data existed on at least one other hard drive.

For backing up windows machines i’d store all your important stuff on the file server like you said. But to back up your OS and Apps I’d clone the entire system partition. Might be a good idea to create two partitions on your Windows boxes. A system partition and a data partition. OS and Apps on system and data on data. :)

I used a free open source clone app called g4u when I worked as a tech in AmeriCorp. It helped me clone over 30 desktop PCs and 27 laptops.

G4U can copy and restore an entire file system across a network with http://ftp. Its uses a boot floppy or CD-R to boot the box you want to clone. Created with FreeBSD. Not sure if it does incremental backups. You can always just backup your My Documents folder or make new whole backups and delete the old ones. :)

An off site backup solution I’ve heard is good is called Iron Mountain. Hundreds of computers here on campus are using this service. You can get yearly subscriptions for your windows box for under $100.

Now if I can just get off my ass and create local backups of all our computers AND do off site backups too. Not to mention all the dbases and website code I have on webservers. Ugh!

It’s funny, I feel like I could live without a backup of my apps and their settings. Granted in the event of a crash, it would be nice to just restart everything from where I left off, but having moved between several personal and work machines and two different operating systems in the last few years, I’ve become less and less attached to the applications and configuration settings I’ve accreted on any given machine.

When I start with a new computer, I enjoy the zen-like simplicity of starting fresh and allowing actual need to motivate me to reinstall and reconfigure things.

That said, when I mentioned wanting to backup My Documents, I really meant everything under C:\Documents and Settings\jwatt on Windows, with includes My Documents, My Desktop, and scads of application settings. I’m not sure how well the situation fares on Mac OSX.

The only issue I’d have with G4U for personal use (if I understand it correctly) is that it requires me getting off my ass and manually cloning a hard drive (i.e. running a backup) with a bootable CD—which I’ve already demonstrated that I probably won’t do. I think a more successful backup would be completely transparent, and the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of the backup server itself being responsible for grabbing and backing up files for several machines, instead of configuring each individual computer to send files to the backup server.

Here’s an example backup server setup like I’m envisioning—though it’s a little more complex than my needs: Setting up a Backup Server

More links: Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Linux and Rsync and Snapshot backup using rsync and ssh

If you’re both using Windows on the laptops, is it possible to just setup SyncToy to automatically copy the appropriate folders across the network every night?

Jason, thanks for the suggestion, I hadn’t heard of SyncToy before.

Chatted about the project with Kyle Rankin this weekend and he suggested checking out BackupPC—which sounds like exactly what I want. Apparently he uses it where he works with great success.

Oh yeah and here’s the best part:

apt-get install backuppc

Looks like I’ve got a project tonight.

Backups are so hot right now: Jeremy Zawodny on A List of Amazon S3 Backup Tools.

Shelley Powers reminds me that my $10/month Dreamhost account, the home of justinsomnia.org and editplus.info, provides 200GB of storage and 2TB of bandwidth a month. But I’m only using 2.5GB and 17GB respectively. Or 1.25% and 0.58%!

That’s a pretty strong argument in favor of Dreamhost for off-site backup, considering I’m already paying for it.

By comparison, using Amazon’s S3 service to the maximum of what Dreamhost allows would cost $430 per month. Dreamhost = $420/month savings. Plus I get shell access. And a webserver. And a database server…

$0.15/GB stored * 200GB = $30
$0.20/GB transfers * 2000GB = $400

Update: I changed by disk usage number above. Turns out something is broken with Dreamhost’s reporting tool, and it was only showing my database disk usage (500MB). I’ve got another 2GB of files on top of that.

I’ve written more about using Ubuntu as a backup server here: How to regularly backup Windows XP to Ubuntu, using rsync