As covered in Part 1, an effective and stress-free backup regimen should conform to the 3-2-1 rule – at least 3 copies of all your important data, with 2 copies on different storage media, and at least 1 copy always in a physically separate location. The setup described below is the best way I’ve found to do this for small business and home users.
The Synology DiskStation
Synology Inc. is a market leader in the design and production of Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. Their DiskStation and RackStation products cover a wide range of sizes and capacities that work for networks from home and small business size all the way up to enterprise installations. A typical DiskStation for home or small business use is a “black box computer” (though some come in white), size about 9″ x 4″ x 6″. It plugs into the network router and provides a huge amount of storage to all the PCs on the network (usually between 4 and 24 terabytes, depending on configuration). Like a traditional network server, the DiskStation is designed to run all the time and provide both primary shared storage and a common backup location; unlike a traditional server, it has an operating system (DiskStation Manager) with a user interface that makes it very easy to setup and use. With all that storage always available, it’s easy to setup every onsite PC to do a full backup every night. And laptop or remote PCs can be set to backup all important data in real time over a secure Internet connection no matter where they are.
That gives you two copies of important data for all PCs (one on the PC itself and one on the DiskStation). There are many options to achieve both the third copy and the “at least 1 in a physically separate location” requirement. The DiskStation has hundreds of installable apps, several of which allow you to set the DiskStation to automatically copy selected data to any of various different online storage services (Amazon, Backblaze, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Rackspace, and many more). You can also install a second DiskStation at a separate location and have the two continuously synchronized via a secure Internet connection. And the DiskStation has high-speed USB connections that allow inexpensive and readily available portable hard disk drives to be used for DiskStation backup.
Backup Software
Windows PCs have had a built-in backup utility since Windows 7, but it is not terribly reliable nor easy to use and manage. I’ve always recommended the Acronis True Image program as a better and affordable alternative (often as little as $10 – $25 per PC depending on current specials). It allows automatic full image backups to be run regularly. This gets everything on the PC – data, programs, Windows, settings. It then allows easy and rapid restore of individual files or folders, or a complete “bare metal” restore of everything from a failed PC.
Case Studies and Costs
I have several clients setup with a dual DiskStation configuration, where one is installed at the office and one at the home of one of the business principals. In each situation there are between 8 to 15 PCs at the office that use a common set of folders on the DiskStation as common storage (the equivalent of the old server “F:” drive). The data files are synchronized continuously between the two DiskStations, allowing the home one to be used as an immediate replacement for the office one should it fail. And the home DiskStation also does a backup of the data to an attached portable hard disk. Each PC also does a nightly image backup to the office DiskStation to capture the current state of its Windows setup, programs, browser favorites, emails, locally stored data files, etc. The PC image backups have too much data to be efficiently transferred via the Internet, so they are backed up to a pair of portable hard disks that are regularly swapped so that one is always off-site. So everything on every PC and the common “server” data always exits in 3 places, with at least 2 copies on different media and at least 1 copy in a physically different location.
The total cost: two DiskStations, each with 4TB of disk storage, about $400 each; the True Image program, about $10 – $25 per PC, and a few hours of setup.
For many of my smaller business and home clients, a single $400 DiskStation is used. The continuous off-site data synchronization is done to an online / cloud service (usually Backblaze B2 for its reliablility and low cost – often less than $5 per month). And rotating portable hard disks capture the copies of the PC image backups.
Either of the above scenarios results in as close as you can get to a “set it and forget it” backup regimen that protects you and your business from catastrophic data loss and sets you up for much easier recovery from even the worst office-wide disaster.