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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