The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #161834   Message #3848687
Posted By: DaveRo
05-Apr-17 - 03:22 AM
Thread Name: Tech: Computer backup: Win10/11, external HDD fail
Subject: RE: Tech: Computer backup - Win10, UPS, external HDD
A few thoughts:

The best feature I found in Win 10, having upgraded my wife's laptop from Win 7, is its File History incremental backup. She backs up to a 'passport' USB3 drive.

The obvious network backup device is a 'home NAS' box. My son has one made by QNAP. It's a RAID device, so supposedly less subject to data loss than an individual HD, though I would mistrust cheap ones. He stores masses a stuff, including music, on it.

You can also hang drives on a router. I fancied a Turris OSS router a while ago but it was too expensive. But cheap routers are increasingly vulnerable to outside attack, and my new Netgear router is not great in that respect, so I may still get one.

The main complication, IMO, is mitigating the threat posed by ramsomware. Some of that will encrypt every connected drive, including networked drives (or networked shares). For that reason my wife's USB drive is not kept plugged in, which makes the process non-automatic. If you're backing up to a permanently network-connected device you need to investigate how to protect it. I don't know how NAS boxes do that, but if I were buying one I'd certainly want to. And I wouldn't trust anti-malware software alone to do it. One reason I liked the Turris+HD setup was that it would be very unusual, unlikely to be targeted by malware writers, and patchable long-term (unlike Netgear).

I do incremental backups over a wired network connection, but using Linux. It's pretty quick (I use rsync). I considered backing the Win 10 boxes (I have one too) to the same drives but the problem I hit was that my Linux drives are all accessed via NFS and you need Windows 10 Enterprise (IIRC) to use them - which is expensive. I don't know how NAS boxes do it - maybe they include NFS drivers.

Hope some if that helps.