Last year I decide to fix the backup problem in our house. They happened so rarely they were almost useless. After some research I bought a Buffalo Link Station to attach to the network. Think of it as a harddrive with a network card – you plug it into the network, turn it on, install from software on your computers. Now you have a network harddrive. 

Mistake

What a mistake. Its slow, noisy and sucks back electricity like it’s going out of style. The original plan – leave it on all the time and just run scheduled backups from our machines. The problem: If left on 24/7 it consumes so (>$100/yr) worth of electricity. Result: We never turn it on.

What a mistake. Its slow, noisy and sucks back electricity like it’s going out of style. The original plan – leave it on all the time and just run scheduled backups from our machines. The problem: If left on 24/7 it consumes so (>$100/yr) worth of electricity. Result: We never turn it on. Even when it is on it runs so slowly as Networked storage that a full backup of 50+ gigabytes takes over a day. Nutsss. In end it gets used as an expensive USB drive. BTW the performance isn't a network issue its the device itself. 

My Solution?

Mozy. For $50/yr I get online backup. It uses Volume Shadow Copy so even files that are in use get backed up. It’s simple, it just installs and works. It took me less than 5 minutes to get started. The downsides: 

• We need one license for each computer in the family. (unless I back everything up to server – but then we're using more electricity again). 
• Bandwidth limits kill – it took about 10 days to do our initial 45 gigabyte backup. I shudder to think how long a restoring the whole thing would take (perhaps 2-4 days). Sadly only a faster internet connection is ever going to solve this problem.

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