• Backup Practices
  • Backup Bookmarks
  • Backup Software
  • Data Loss & Theft
  • External Drives
  • Online Backup
  • Reviews
  • Tutorials
  • Website Backups

FileSlinger Backup Blog

  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • E-zine
  • Questions?
  • Review Policy
  • Comment Policy
  • Disclosures

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 8-20-04: Network Backups

August 20, 2004 by Sallie Goetsch Leave a Comment

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

It’s that time again—time to protect your data against the inevitable computer disaster. And it is pretty much inevitable. Drive failure seems to be on the increase and often occurs at about the two-year mark, but might happen even sooner, depending on everything from the manufacturer to whether it gets adequate cooling. If you’re really lucky, a hard drive might last you 5 or 6 years.

The other night I got to watch the Ur-Guru making a network backup of a client’s laptop in order to reformat the drive. The simple version of how this works is:

  1. Plug the computer to be backed up into your network. (This machine had a built-in network port, so that was easy.)
  2. Designate a network drive on which to back up the machine. (Windows calls this “mapping” the drive.) This actually took some special utilities because the backup program we were using, Norton Ghost, works outside the Windows environment.
  3. Run your drive-mirroring software.

Presto: a copy of computer one stored on computer two.

Transferring data over a network is much faster than writing it to a CD or to a USB or even Firewire drive. It can also spare you having to get an external drive, as long as you have more than one machine on your network and the machine you want to put your backups on has lots of extra hard drive space.

It is possible that every machine on a network could go down at one time (fire, flood, earthquake, etc), just as it’s possible that both your computer and your external drive could be destroyed at the same time. But it’s not nearly as likely that two computers will die simultaneously as that one drive will fail when another is fine.

There can be some tricky bits involved in setting up network backups, depending on your hardware, and a Ghost backup won’t work over a wireless network. (Wireless networks are much slower than cable networks anyway, even if you don’t notice this in your day-to-day e-mail and web browsing.) But they can still be a good option for anyone who already has a home or office network set up.

More backup news next week,

Sallie

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Network Storage

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Search

Google Ads

Categories

  • Announcements
  • Archiving
  • Backup Bookmarks
  • Backup Devices
  • Backup Practices
  • Backup Software
  • CD & DVD Backups
  • Data Loss & Theft
  • Data Recovery
  • Drive Failure
  • Drive Imaging
  • E-mail Backups
  • Events
  • External Drives
  • Flash Drives
  • Guest Bloggers
  • Hardware Failure
  • Humor
  • Mac Backups
  • Mobile Backup
  • Network Storage
  • Offsite Backups
  • Online Backup
  • RAID
  • Removable Drives
  • Reviews
  • Storage
  • Tape Backup
  • Traveling Backups
  • Tutorials
  • Website Backups

Tags

Elsewhere

  • BACN
  • East Bay WordPress Meetup
  • Rhymes with Sketch
  • The Author-izer
  • WP Fangirl

Find Sallie Online

Backup Poll

When was the last time you backed up your computer?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...
  • Polls Archive

Tags

.MAC Acronis Amazon S3 annual archive backup Backup Bookmarks BACN Bart-PE Buffalo carbon copy cloner Carbonite CloudBerry Cloud Computing Coding Horror CrashPlan disaster recovery Dmailer DriveImage DriveSavers Dropbox DVD Flickr Ghost Google Docs Iron Mountain Karen's Replicator LinkedIn LiveVault Maxtor Memeo Mozy RAID Rebit reminder Retrospect Seagate social backup Spare Backup SyncBack SyncBack Freeware Titan Backup WordPress XHD year-end backup Zoogmo

Copyright © 2023 · Metro Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in