How do you backup?

[Hi-Fi Man]

Currently I use an external enclosure over eSATA with two Seagate 1TB Constellation ES.3 SATA drives in RAID 1 (via enclosure).

Right now the external enclosure backs up my workstation via Windows 10 file history which works okay but I would like to have something more robust and something with 24/7 up time so I can use the previous versions Windows feature.

I was wondering if setting up a dedicated backup server would make sense for a single workstation and laptop. I have all the parts necessary to build a decent server; an AMD FX 770K (OEM kaveri dual module part), ASRock FM2A88M Extreme4+ R2.0 mobo, LSI 9212-4i SAS HBA, 2U µATX inter-tech case, 5.25" SATA/SAS hotswap bay, various Intel GbE NICs, and an LSI 20320IE SCSI HBA. I also have several drives unused right now; an HGST Deskstar NAS 5TB, HGST Ultrastar C15K600 600GB, Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 300GB, and the two drives in my external enclosure can be re-purposed as well. The only thing I may need to get is some more RAM, especially if I'm going to use ZFS.

There are many ways to go about this but I'm not sure what I should do if it's even worth it.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I can't advise you about the best of several options or the extra hardware you are eyeing to build some sort of backup server.

I personally began kloodging together servers for my LAN as early as 2000, using spare hard disks, NT Server OS, then Win 2K workstation, briefly an evaluation copy of Server 2000. Eventually, I built a WHS v.1 server, upgraded to WHS-2011. This latter server ran for the last four or five years and was a real advantage. It would back up each and every Win 7 client in the house every night, and there were three situations which proved the reliable bare-metal restoration to a workstation.

Because the hardware was old and I didn't want to bother seeing if I could get three activations out of the old WHS-2011 (Win Server 2008 R2), I picked up a license to 2012 R2 Essentials. Many have noted that this was more than I needed or more than I needed to spend to build a server.

Even so, for WHS-2011 and 2012 R2 Essentials, I was pleased with using Stablebit DrivePool to pool AHCI-mode disks and implement duplication (like RAID1) at the file and folder level -- offering reduced storage usage such as you'd have under RAID1.

Basically, if you want to avoid spending on the server OS, you could use Windows 10 Pro with StableBit DrivePool and still configure your clients to back up to the server. With the 2011 and 2012 R2 OSes, backup is configured at the server desktop after adding workstations through the server dashboard.

Assume, though, that you might not want to build a dedicated Home server. Before migrating from 2011 to 2012R2, I discovered that 2011 would not properly back up a Win 10 system. If there were tweaks that could be made, I didn't pursue it. And I was using Macrium Reflect to repair my most recent Win 10 Skylake system.

So I decided to back up the Win 10 system using Macrium Reflect. It is absolutely stellar as a local backup solution, but operated from a local workstation, it will also backup to a network folder or mapped disk. If you want incremental as well as differential and full backups, you'd pay about $60 or $70 for the license.

Restoration from Macrium images is reliable and fast. Right now, I have it both ways: all the other Win 7 systems are being backed up by the 2012 R2 server, while the Win 10 system has local Macrium imaging backup. I like the local backup with Macrium so much that configuring 2012R2 to do the backups for that system will either be a kind of redundancy, or I will delay configuring it that way indefinitely.