Small Business Home Network With Auto Back Up
My wife and I work at home. We have two offices, one at one end of the house and another in the middle of the house. Over the years, we have developed a good computer network for us. Ours is a Windows system but the principles should work on Macs as well.
I believe you will find our solution to be simple, straightforward, and effective. We prevent the loss of data as much as possible and we share what we need to share and keep separate what we need to keep separate. Our system is low maintenance and inexpensive.
We have a multi-computer network: one file server, two workstations, plus a laptop for travel. Our primary concern is protecting the work we create and edit on our workstations, so our laptop does not play a prominent role in this article.
We automatically back up our data that our programs keep on our workstation C drives (such as email, bookmarks, and desktop icons) to our network data drive. A program automatically copies this data from our workstations to our server when we log off. A lot of people neglect to back up this kind of data and it is a mistake to fail to remember to do so.
We keep all of our documents on our file server, never on our workstations, on a devoted data disk drive. We each have a documents folder on that drive. A program that runs every night automatically backs up our file server to a second server back up hard drive.
Finally, we have an off site Internet-based automatic back up of our data drive as a second back up.
As you can see, all of our data ends up on one disk drive on our server and we back up that one drive in two ways. Thus, we are protected against a large loss of data. Read the rest of this entry »