.FLYINGHEAD KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES’ BACKUPS
.TITLE Introducing the Jones family and their full-family backup challenges
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
.SUMMARY We believe there’s a new family in town, one that’s got a lot more computers than even a few years ago.
.OTHER
There’s a new family in town. The Jones family has a lot more computers than most families of even a few years ago, and therefore also has a lot more issues of backup and security.
Here at Computing Unplugged, we put together a composite of this new kind of computer-overburdened family. We then spent the last year or so testing a variety of solutions in order to determine a good overall mix of reliable backup solutions.
This week, we’ll talk about the computing environment. In the next few weeks, we’ll talk about each of the various solutions and how they worked out (and some that failed miserably).
.TEASER Tap here and let’s meet the Joneses — and their computers.
.H1 Meet the Joneses
Joan Jones is the mom. She attends college, does some part-time bookkeeping work for a few clients from home. She has two computers, a laptop she takes to school and a desktop she works on in her home office.
Joan recently changed things up. She decided she wanted to turn her laptop into a second, downstairs desktop-equivalent and bought a netbook to take to school.
So, we’re at three computers, already.
Josh Jones works at the office, but brings work home. He, too, has two computers. His laptop is sometimes brought to work, but he usually brings work home on flash drives.
His office doesn’t take responsibility for backing up the laptop. His desktop is used for PC gaming, photo editing and organizing, and other high-end CPU-intensive tasks. This is a Windows Vista 64 machine, which he plans to upgrade to Windows 7 next year.
Josh also has a Mac, which he uses exclusively to run some Mac-specific software he sometimes needs for work. It should be backed up, but it’s not used all that often. Other than the Mac, all the other machines in the family are PCs running XP or Windows 7.
We’re up to six computers.
Joan and Josh have a teen son, Jason, who also has two computers. One is a relatively older machine that’s now tricked out to act as a gaming server for his friends.
Teen Jason also has a relatively powerful gaming rig used to play games, do his homework, and organize his music. He also Twitters and Facebooks to a level his parents barely understand.
Jason is computer-aware and wants to backup his homework and music, as well as all the hard-to-reproduce settings on his server (which he never wants to turn off, because people are always playing on it).
Jane is the Jones’ pre-teen daughter. Jane has a hand-me-down PC from Dad. She does homework on it, and visits Encyclopedia Britannica (teachers at her school virtually foam at the mouth at mentions of Wikipedia).
Little Jane rarely plays games, but does like watching TV episodes on the PC. This PC is located in the family room, where the parents can watch her while she’s online. She often watches her PC while her parents watch TV on the big screen TV.
Jane has absolutely no awareness of backup or most computer technology, but would cry if she lost her homework or bookmarks.
We’re now at nine computers.
The Jones family has a PC connected into the entertainment center. It’s used to watch YouTube videos as well as play PC games. The entertainment center is an HD system with all the major game consoles as well as a big TV and the PC.
This PC is also used by Josh when he wants to do work, but sit on the couch. You might not think it needs to be backed up, but it’s a special configuration and it also often has work documents needed by Dad.
Dad Josh took another old PC and loaded that sucker down with hard drives, basically allocating one drive per family member. There’s tons of movies and music, as well as the family’s photo library and library of home movies.
Joan and Josh also use it as a shared document server to manage family documents like medical records and tax information.
All told, the Jones family has eleven computers (and that doesn’t include TiVos, iPads, iPhones, various Xboxes, Playstations, and the like — none of which need traditional backup).
.H1 A thoroughly modern family
So there you go. The Joneses are a modern family and it reflects how many of us use our computers.
If you count it up, you’re taking about 11 PCs and probably terabytes of data. Many of those PCs need to be able to backup while the machine is running programs (like email or the game server) and Josh probably would like it if he could restore to new hardware instead of what he’s already got in case of failure.
Dad wants to have a local backup, but is also concerned about an offsite backup. He’s tried Mozy and Carbonite, and while he can restore individual files, in the case of a total failure, it’s impractical to download terabytes from the cloud.
Over the past year, we’ve taken a bunch of runs at this project and had some surprising failures (and some equally surprising successes).
Stay tuned as we walk you through what worked — and what to avoid.
.H1 Editor’s note
We had actually intended to run this series almost 12 months ago, but because we ran into so many troublesome snags in implementation, it’s taken a while to both find better tools, test them out, and see what’s worked and what hasn’t. More to come next week. This is an important series.
.BIO
