Backing up Windows Home Server away from Home

Now that most of the home data is sitting safely on the Windows Home Server it’s time to think backup strategy. It’s called a strategy for a reason – disaster is not something you want to experience but it’s an absolute certainty that it will happen so you plan.

Our truely precious family data (mostly financials, documents and pictures) are stored on Own Web Now’s enterprise storage network, that thing is never going to disappear. Until now I also used MozyHome backup service, although highly amateur and frankly substandard form of offsite backup by any measure, you cannot beat backing up a few TB of raw video and mp3’s for $55 a year. Worked fine on the workstations.

However, we’re in file server land now at Casa De Vlad, and that means backing up the server. So I tried Mozy. Woops:

Mozy doesn’t support Windows Home Server. It does not even support file shares (presumably for this very reason) so no way of running it off a workstation to backup Windows Home Server file shares. Now MozyPro supposedly does the file server backup but at $0.50 / GB, I’m more inclined to trust OWN for twice the cost. So Mozy, bye, bye.

But I figured I’d try out something in the meantime. There is already a Jungle Disk Online Backup add-in for Windows Home Server which uses Amazon S3 for the storage backend. Fair enough, giving that a shot right now. It is horribly slow but…

…. but I live in Florida and I need a backup I don’t have to maintain. No tapes, no USB drives, no burning CD’s. I just want it to pick my important data and let me have access to it when Florida sinks into the ocean or gets blown over into Mexico as a result of the latest hurricane. If I wake up in the middle of the night and the house is on fire I am not running to the Home Server, I’m sacking the dog, water bowl and getting the hell out of here. And as my place is burning to the foundation, or waterfront propery on the Gulf of Mexico, or someone robbed the house, or it just turns out to be my unlucky day in the lightning capitol of the world that is under tornado warning as I write this blog post…. Lucy better be hanging out with my stuff. (If you get the Lucy reference you are way too old. So old Susan Bradley is pulling up the bands of her era from a dusty encyclopedia talking about the British Invasion)

Life with the Windows Home Server is pretty sweet. Today we spent the afternoon streaming Die Hard 4.0 from Windows Home Server to the Xbox in the living room. Katie spent the morning listening to the MP3 streams from the same.

P.S. I also owe Katie an apology for the blog earlier this week when I implied she only uses the Xbox to stream MP3’s. She reminded me that she also has two blogs, that she remained married to me even after I installed Office 2007 on her PC, that she emailed Karl while driving around the other day and I added “and you text around on your Blackjack all the time” to which she replied: “I don’t text, I email! SMS? What am I, some sort of an animal?”