I'm looking at options for doing proper backups for my home PCs. I want to backup my machine and my wife's laptop. Reliability and speed is important for my machine since I use it for work, and plan to do system and data backups daily (OS, programs, app data, and non-media documents).
I did a lot of searching and came up with a few viable solutions. I read that external HHDs are less reliable than internal ones. Plan is to buy an external enclosure and some decent SATA drives. Home Server like WHS + required hardware seems like overkill, and I don't think it works in Vista and Win 7.
Option 1
NAS enclosure connected through ethernet to both machines. Acronis or similar program does scheduled backups.
Issues: Much slower than eSata.
Option 2
eSATA enclosure connected to my machine. Share the drive through windows on the network. Fast eSata for my backups (lots of data), and slower connection for my wife's laptop (only a 100GB drive)
Issues: Will backup software work properly on a shared drive? Any issues with both PCs accessing the eSata drive simultaneously?
Any other suggestions/comments appreciated.
Issues:
I did a lot of searching and came up with a few viable solutions. I read that external HHDs are less reliable than internal ones. Plan is to buy an external enclosure and some decent SATA drives. Home Server like WHS + required hardware seems like overkill, and I don't think it works in Vista and Win 7.
Option 1
NAS enclosure connected through ethernet to both machines. Acronis or similar program does scheduled backups.
Issues: Much slower than eSata.
Option 2
eSATA enclosure connected to my machine. Share the drive through windows on the network. Fast eSata for my backups (lots of data), and slower connection for my wife's laptop (only a 100GB drive)
Issues: Will backup software work properly on a shared drive? Any issues with both PCs accessing the eSata drive simultaneously?
Any other suggestions/comments appreciated.
Issues: