I am strongly considering Carbonite for additional off-site backup protection but have another idea/question. I realized that we have several computers throughout the house that each have 120 GB hard drives or larger. The vast majority of this space is also free because everything important is stored on the server, for obvious reasons.
Wouldn't that be neat if there was an application that could be installed on many computers (or server only pushing data to network share) that would allow certain folders to be specified for backup and at that point, it would automatically scan for computers to be turned on (if server software only) and then it would start pushing files out to the computers. Each time a computer was turned on, its data would be scanned for updating or moved around depending on its operations on other computers.
If it is server only, the server would have an application where a user would add new computers to the list. These entries would point to a network share on other computers.
It's easy to see that as long as the computers are each turned on from time to time or always on, data could easily be saved and archived if there is enough space. Users backing up small amounts of data would get multiple copies of their data (only different files) on different computers throughout their house.
It would not be a good backup on its own but it would help utilize all the wasted space on all of our computers. And if I build new home theater pcs I could invest a little more in the hard drive to get some more capacity, thus improving my backup strategy even more.
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Topic: Any auto backup ideas? (Read 1163 times)