My homeserver (v1!) has pretty much died so I'd had to come up with an alternative in a bit of a hurry. I didn't have time or the wish to build a dedicated box at the time, so I have a 3x3TB WD Red drives as a storage space which has a folder "Shared" with the old shared folders and "Backup" for backups. Currently I'm using File History backing up to that backup share, including files on the sharded folders on the same storage space which I wanted to do so the "Previous versions" feature worked, but alas it is very wasteful keeping multiple copies of unchanged files. Now the plan was to have the shared folders and backups backed up to the cloud with something like crashplan, but have a local backup to use in normal circumstances. However I'm really rather unimpressed with how File History manages incremental backups compared to WHS. At the moment the backup of the 985Gb Shared Folders is at 3.7TB despite the bulk of those files being untouched. So what is a good alternative, while keeping it as tidily integreated into Windows (10) as possible?
Veeam Backup Free? 14 days worth of incremental backups only just over twice the size of the drive it is backing up. The drive then has Dedup running which has it down to less then half of that. YMMV
If you're happy using Crashplan, and you want to keep all your eggs in one basket, then it's possible to configure Crashplan with two backup destinations. One to their cloud service, and a second to a local drive. I use Crashplan on OS X and have found it totally reliable, but I've never had to restore anything of a significant size. I have something like 3TB of data backed up to the cloud. I also use Dropbox for my main working project directory, so the 60GB of data in there is kept backed up in real time. And then there's TimeMachine (Was Acronis when on Windows) for a periodic backup, but I don't keep that drive attached all the time, just once every few weeks. And then there's a couple of external drives which are used to make periodic file backups of the large family media drive. I find it easier to restore 98% of everything the easy 'drag and drop' way and then rely on an official backup/restore solution for the remaining 2% and data integrity checks. Local file backup + TimeMachine/Acronis + Dropbox + Crashplan Lessons learned: Make sure you have a backup to your backup's backup.
Yes, I have ONE backup approach. It just happens my single solution uses the source data and four different targets.
ZFS looks decent, but I would have to really commit to building a Linux server so sit it on, right now. I'd have to either but more disks or move the current share off and rebuild it there. Somehow I can see myself getting it half build and leaving it. However it would probably do the job in the end. VM backup only or can it be persuaded to backup multiple PCs instead. Thinking again about this, the cloud backup is less of an issue than the local backup software as it is more likely to be used to recover old versions of files than anything else. Crashplan is lookign tempting, possibly with the business-critical stuff also synced to onedrive.
I'm still a bit worried about Crashplan, some people ranting against it, some happy. Probably a Glacier is safer bet even if it costs more and is more hassle. So I need a decent local incremental backup solution, and I'll copy that backup up to Amazon's mercies. It's also about time I cleaned out my archives as it must be over 50% duplicated junk. I could probably grab some freeware but I suspect it might be better just to write a bit of vba to dump the directory listings into a table in access and work out what I want to lose myself.
