For a long time a have been avoiding the centralization of my backup plans. In our house, we have 2 desktop computers, one laptop and one server with several virtual machines running on it (including this blog). So there is a need for a network accessible storage device that would serve as a backup medium and also as a place to dump rarely needed files.

I while ago I found FreeNAS an excellent Linux based NAS solution. It can be booted as a live CD with a floppy, USB stick or CF card as a medium to store settings in XML format. But then I did not have the time to play with it and also my old VIA based mini server died on me. This week I has enough of waiting. I cannot play with my data, after all if I am not responsible about my data who will be (I make a living out of it after all). So I bought an old Pentium 3 based desktop with 256MB of RAM for 50 EUR. It also has an 1.44 floppy which is perfect in this case. I threw out the 10GB hard drive that was in it and plugged in my 500GB IDE disk I bought a while ago for this purposes. Then I prepared for an afternoon of learning, customizing etc…

Well it took me 5-10 minutes and I had it running. The FreeNAS is really powerfull and simple to use. You just boot from live CD, assign an interface (LAN card) and IP and you are ready to go. Through a clear web interface you assign a hard drive, format it and mount a partition. Then you enable SAMBA and RSYNC and you are ready to copy data. There is also support for FTP, Unison, NFS, AFP, SSH and even torrents. You can also schedule hard drive tests via S.M.A.R.T, encrypt your data, set access rights and much, much more.

So when this was done (the longest task was finding a 1.44 floppy that didn’t have bad sectors, which was quite a chalenge with all this old floppies around) I tried to find a good windows backup tool (linux has rsync). I do not want to install Cygwin because I always have a felling that it is an unclean installation (and I don’t have time to play with it to get the minimum install just to support rsync). In the end I ended with GFI Backup 2009 and so far I am happy with it. I supports incremental backups and can compress the backup to single archive. And this is pretty much all I need.

I also considered some other solutions. Cobian, FileHamster, Unison and few others but I will stick with GFI for now on Windows.