Home Laptop running Vista 64 bit, this has the majority of music/movies/documents that need to be backed up and shared.
Work Laptop running Windows 7, this has a very few items that will need to be backed up
Have PS3, Xbox 360, and bedroom TV on network that I would like to view the shared items on.
I would like to do a full back up the first time and then run a daily back up of new items. For example, I would back up my music folder, then if I bought 5 songs the next day, they would be added to the back up when ran that night. I don’t want to have to keep running full back ups for just a couple items every day.
Now here is where I have no idea what is going on. When I do a back up, are the files copied over like a copy of my laptop files that are put in the shared folders? Or is it just a couple of big files that I would restore from if my laptop went down? If the files aren’t seperated, would I have to do a back up and then also move all my media files to the public shared folder? Then how do I do the daily sync of new files for the back up and/or shared folder?
Aparrently WD’s SmartWare does this. Initial back-up will take ages and afterwards only changed and added stuff wil be backed up. I’ve not used it yet because I’m waiting for my gigabit switch to arrive before I try use it for a backup. WD SmartWare might take a while to classify your files but it’ll be less time than copying the whole lot across each time.
I’m not sure at the moment if you can direcxtly access on the NAS any files backed up with WD’s SmartWare BUT there is a hidden NetBIOS share. You can acess it using \\MyBookLive\SmartWare. It does not show-up when browsing the shares on the NAS the share seems to be a normal public netwok share.
Microsoft’s SyncToy would be a perfect candidate for what you want to do but, unfortunatly, it causes to Samba service on the My Book Live to panic and crash which will termnate the synchronisation. The NAS’s Linux OS does restarted it bit it only gets to panic and crash over and over at each attempt.
You can’t directly access the backup the files made with smartware but you can recover individual files from the smartware application. You have to trust that smartware has backed up the files which are hidden from normal view.
So this is what I need to do: 1. Using the Smartware, I need to do a full backup. Then I can go into the settings and have it run where it only keeps one file. That will just add missing files and update changed files like documents without the time consuming full back up? 2. Then I need to drag all my media into the correct shared folder in order to access it over the network. Now what do I use to sync those files daily for when I buy music or movies?
With Smartware all you do is select music, documents , mail, movies, pictures or other. It then backs up your selection automatically. It then monitors any changes or updates and automatically and adds them to the backup. You don’t have to reset anything after you first set it up. You cannot see this backup however as it is hidden and it can only be used for recovering your files in the event that something happens on your PC.
It will do image backups and incremental backups. It’s got 2 different modes (disk image backup and file backup). I just got a drive for fathers day and so far (with 1 day of use) it seems to be working well.
