I have two daughters in college and I know that they will not remember
often to back up their computers.

I am wondering if it is a consideration to purchase a router with a VPN
or to purchase a program that will set up a VPN to allow them to back up
their computers to one of our home computers that I use just for storage
(it is an XP box with 600Gb of storage). If so, what programs/hardware
would I need?

Thanks
Ken K

Start small. How do you backup YOUR home computers? ;-)

Ken wrote:
They will never learn fend for themselves if you always try to
save them.

--


Travis in Shoreline Washington

Ken wrote:

Please don't, even if you find a way to do so. Having tens of thousands of
college kids backing up hundreds of GBs of HD each, every night or even
every
week, will consume a major portion of the world's bandwidth. What a waste.

--
Cheers, Bob

In article <Z7adnfbFiqUCzMLeRVn-pw@comcast.com>,
BobwBSGS@TrashThis.comcast.net says...
Au contraire!
In this case, we'll all soon be on a 10 Gbps network.
Hmmm, oh, but you already have that in the US !

--
ICQ# 114297372

Peter wrote:
incremental backups each night. These files are then backed up in the
early AM to a computer in another part of the house that is used only
for backup, so that I have redundancy. The house is alarmed and there
is a fire alarm. Our fire station is 2 blocks away and our neighborhood
pays extra to the city for additional patrols, resulting in an almost
negligible theft rate in our area. So short of a fire that sweeps
through our long home or forgetting to set the alarm and being robbed, I
am covered fairly well. I do not have off-site redundancy, although I
do have a removable SATA hdd that I may take to the office once a week.
I don't want to be TOO compulsive.... ;-)

Ken wrote...
At home, I always try to train my 12-years-old boy to take care
of himself, even he is still not doing it quite well yet.

At work, I always try to teach my fellow workers to solve their
problems by themselves first, before comming to me asking for help.

If you solve the problems for them, they will come to you every
single time. And I do not enjoy pampering other people.

That you cannot do over Internet. You must be more selective it choosing
data files.

Setup home VPN server. Create shares on a storage PC for a backup purpose.
On remote PCs (your daughters), identify folders, which need to be backed up
("My Documents"). Then write a script which would connect to your VPN server
and copy changed files to your folders on a storage PC. You can use a time
stamp or better yet, application like "Second Copy 2000" to avoid copying
the same files again. Shutdown PC at the end. Schedule that script to run
every night and ask your daughters to leave PCs on, before they go to bed.

Actually you can do scheduling, VPN connecting and mapping drives using
"Second Copy 2000" advanced properties.

Give it a try.

Harry <harryooopotter@hotmail.co_> wrote
On the other hand, with something done as unreliably as
backup, there is a lot to be said for a fully automated solution.

And the bandwidth requirement should be minimal if the backup is
incremental and not just mindless brute force image backup at a high rate.

Ken <ken@comcast.net> wrote
No reason why you couldnt automate that bit over VPN for your kids.

It wouldnt cost that much more to have that computer in
the other part of the house in a fireproof safe that isnt easy
to find so isnt going to be found by the unlikely burglars.

Sounds like a pretty decent approach.

Rod Speed wrote...

Agree.

Also found a link for the OP.
http://www.backup-for-workgroups.com...netmirror.html

Paul Atreides wrote:
Not in my part of the US.

--


Travis in Shoreline Washington

Bob Willard <BobwBSGS@TrashThis.comcast.net> wrote
And proper incremental backup wont.

Only if that mindlessly crude approach is used.

Its actually something crying out for a decent commercial solution, stupid.

Paul Atreides wrote:

dollars per month for Broadband with transfer rates somewhere around 3-15
Mbits/sec download and 256-512k bits/sec upload. Nearly all the rest are on
either DSL or dial up. There is a very small number of poeple who are using
special university networks that allow very high speeds for very specific
types of transfers and not for general purpose every day Internet use.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch!
Eric

Eric wrote:
We pay $29.95 a month for 3.0/768 ADSL.

--


Travis in Shoreline Washington

Rod Speed wrote:

backup probably
can't set up a more complicated schedule of fulls plus incrementals either.

--
Cheers, Bob

Bob Willard <BobwBSGS@TrashThis.comcast.net> wrote:
Sounds like the kids wont be setting it up, because they arent that competant.

"Ken" <ken@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:14OdnefBjPihZ8PeRVn-pg@comcast.com...
Streamload.com offers 10Gb of storage online.

Depends on what they have in their files (ie. confidential, video ...)

I am not affiliated with the above, I noticed the company in an article last
month.

"Ken" <ken@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:14OdnefBjPihZ8PeRVn-pg@comcast.com...
FolderShare looks like a great option ... it can be setup to sync
new/updated files automatically ... but if they have accumulated a lot
of mp3's and other stuff then any backup will take a long time even
over a broadband connection ...
https://www.foldershare.com/

"Ken" <ken@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:14OdnefBjPihZ8PeRVn-pg@comcast.com...
They're college girls. Chances are that they don't *want* to be sending the
contents of their hard drives back home to daddy. I feel for ya though.