Free Offsite Backup For Windows Home Server With Live Mesh
**UPDATE** Jim and Chris have uncovered a limitation while testing this theory. There is a 2 gig single file size limit to Live Mesh. We are working on a solution and will post it when we come up with one. In the mean time, don’t beat your brains out trying to make this work. **
There has been a fair amount of buzz surrounding the integration of Windows Home Server and Live Mesh. If Mesh had unlimited storage potential or your only had 5 gigs of data to backup, it would be a great solution for offsite backup. There are pay options like Keepvault, Jungle Disk and others, but most of us like to hold on to our hard earned dollars. Most of us also know someone with extra hard drive space or even room on their home server that they would be willing to share. This post describes how you can establish an offsite backup of files on your home server for free to another machine using live mesh. The components used are NTBackup (part of WHS) and Live Mesh. Let’s get started.
Step 1 – Create an ‘Offsite folder’ in the shared folders tab of the Home Server.
Step 2 – Setup your backup
Remote onto the desktop of your home server and run NTBackup.exe
Use Advanced Mode
Select folders that you want to store offsite via the My Network Places folder
(Entire Network > Microsoft Windows Network > Workgroup)
Set your target folder in My Network Places folder
(Entire Network > Microsoft Windows Network > Workgroup > ‘Server’ > Offsite)
Click “Start Backup” – Be sure that “Allow only the owner and the Administrator access to the backup data.”
Set the Backup type to Incremental. This will set the backup so that there isn’t a huge transfer when small files are updated.
You can then Schedule for the interval you want. Weekly is probably more than enough.
Step 3 – Install Live Mesh on the Home Server
Open Internet Explorer on the home server and go to www.mesh.com. Log into your account (or create one if you haven’t already) and add the home server as a device.
Step 4 – Make your shared folder a ‘Mesh’ folder
Go to your home server desktop, open My Computer, go to your data drive and find the shares folder, right click in the offsite folder and select “Add Folder to Live Mesh”.
Be sure to log onto your mesh desktop and change the sync properties to NOT sync to the Mesh Desktop unless that is where you want it (remember the 5 gig limit).
Step 5 – Make a Friend a Member of the Folder
The mesh folder needs to sync somewhere, so this is where your friend comes in. Add your friend as a member of the mesh folder using their e-mail address. On their end, they need to point the folder to their free hard drive space (on a hard drive or their home server). You might want to make them a read only member so they can’t delete your backups unintentionally.
That’s it! Now, when your scheduled backups run, the new file will be sent securely over mesh to your friends house and is safely backed up online.
<this post was prepared by Christopher Lux>
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Category: Home Server Storage, Software, Windows Home Server
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Are you verified that this method actually works? There are plenty of people who have said NTBackup and similar backup softwares do not understand Drive Extender and therefore they backup only the "tombstones" of the files and not the files themselves.
Have you verified that this method actually works? There are plenty of people who have said NTBackup and similar backup softwares do not understand Drive Extender and therefore they backup only the "tombstones" of the files and not the files themselves.
It seemed to have worked while I was using it! I sent files and my friend was able to open the backup file and see the files included within. I personally think this scenario works better by syncing unencrypted folders, but you have to trust your friend.
This solution works great, but as mentioned in the podcast, NTBackup is not a great choice for the backup software. My understanding is that it was chosen so that the backup file could be encrypted. Another limitation it may have is that incremental backups append to the same backup file. Can this be changed so that subsequent incremental backups are made to a new file? If this can't be set, then live mesh needs to sync the whole backup every time that a new incremental backup is done.
Regardless, there are *lots* of excellent backup programs out there. I'm using an excellent free program by the name of Cobian Backup. This particular program allows me to do incremental backups into new folders, so that only new backups are synced with live mesh. There are options to zip up backups into archives of any size that you like (will get around the 2 GB limit of live mesh), and it can even encrypt the backup files (no more need for NTBackup). I'm now doing automated offsite backups with my work pc.
Cobian Backup is so good that I am using it to overcome that one glaring major oversight of Home Server, backing up the home server shares themselves. I back these up just in case someone accidentally deletes all of our photos from our photos share. Folder duplication won't save you in this scenario. The program can even be set to do a full backup every x backups, and you can run programs before and after backups. All scheduled of course.
Thanks for the article guys. I'm now one very happy Home Server user.
Rob
For this to work, Live Mesh has to be running as a service. It is not.
Live Mesh will perform folder syncing only when an active Desktop session with Live Mesh is running. With WHS one normally is not supposed to (or will) be logged in on a regular basis.
- Theo.
Theodoor – Jim and I ran into a few snags with the Live Mesh option. It worked, but seemed to be a bit sluggish at times. Listen to show 54 for a review of an alternative option using a program called Crash Plan. Achieves the same thing in less steps and works great!