Network backup choices.

Hello forum people!

I am curious today, at how to do something. I have a couple of friends that have a laptop and a desktop and want to use the desktop as a main backup, Hulk-like thing that will hold a plethora of data.

My question is this, how?

I'm thinking I could use HomeGroup to do that, but I don't think that solves anything. Or, use a NAS box for such. But preferably, the least cost as possible with this.

I was wondering if the desktop could be used as the backup device in this situation over the network. If so, I don't know how to get that going.

Thanks.

Hi,

What sort of information on the laptop do they want to backup? Just user data (e.g. music, photo's etc) or the entire laptop (e.g. Windows system files and other user data)?

If its the latter, the easiest way to backup the entire laptop is doing an image of the laptop to an external USB drive, not the desktop. Is this an option? If so, please see these tutorials:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/73828-imaging-free-macrium.html
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/218920-macrium-reflect-create-bootable-rescue-usb-drive.html

If its user files only, then you could use ROBOCOPY to perform this between folders on the HomeGroup:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/187346-robocopy-create-backup-script.html

Regards,
Golden

Use any imaging software. When finished, copy the file to the backup location. Piece of cake.

The preferred method would be to do a networked backup since I would think it would be tedious to backup new data. The main thing that would be backed up would be user data.

@Coke Robot,

Do you want to do a backup to the desktop, or do you want to just store the data itself on the desktop and share it out for the other machine on the network?