I have a small home network with 5PC’s running either WinXP or Win7.
I was “getting nervous” about the haphazard way files were being stored and backed up on each machine so I decided to do some “organizing.” The idea was to (1) get a network storage device of some flavor and map it on each machine as the “M: Drive”, (2) transfer all the accumulated files off these PC’s over to the new data “mothership”, (3) properly reorganize this collection into a community of folders accessible by all, and (4) vector this preened-and-cleaned file collection over to Mozy, my offline backup service provider for many years.
Sounds like a plan…
Well, I purchased the MyBook World Edition, installed it (NO big deal there), and spent HOURS transferring and organizing the family files onto its cavernous RAID0 drives.
And now I’m stuck on what was SUPPOSED to be the “easy part.” Item #4 - backing up my new NAS to a remote service.
- Mozy Home refuses to recognize my LAN’s new (and universally-mapped) M: Drive. Mozy Support sez they CAN do this - but I’ve got to “upgrade” to Business Class service and increase my monthly bill by a FACTOR OR TEN (10)!!! Yep, from $4.95/mo to roughly $50/mo - to store the same data they’ve been holding for nearly two years. Nuts to that…
- So I tried SOS. For two weeks I gave it my best shot - including separate one-hour sessions with their techies doing remote access on my totally vanilla XP SP3 machine. The techies finally gave up and offered to refund my first month’s payment of $9.95. SOS would “see” my M: Drive - but it just wouldn’t “remember” which files and folders I wanted it to backup. Aggravating. Their client software seems as flaky as the stuff we used to run on my TRS-80 (that’s “early 1970’s” in case you weren’t yet born - or using “computers” then).
- Now I’ve loaded CrashPlan (on a 30 day free trial basis). I’ve been plundering through their User Forums and am discovering they don’t know how to run backups FROM a NAS TO their online storage servers, either. They say their client software runs at the System level - so it doesn’t recognize mapped drives (nor does it seem to recognize the other two less common “networky” ways of specifying the MyBook resource).
So here I am at your doorstep. I hope I’ve paid my dues.
Now is there anyone out there who can tell me how to make a backup of ALL the data on this nifty NAS to a remote server anywhere out there in CyberLand?
Thanks for listening (and, hopefully, NOT laughing too much…).
Rick
