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This has been an interesting thread. I've been vacillating for a while over what sort of backup would be best for my parents, and this has prompted me to think a bit harder about it again. They have a laptop, and that's about it: no smartphones, etc.
My parents' files that need backing up are word documents (tens of kilobytes), emails (I'd guess a kilobyte each, not counting attachments) and, a few times a year, batches of at most a hundred photos of a few megabytes each. No videos. So buying terabytes of storage would be silly.
The initial thought was just to use a portable hard drive plugged in to the laptop. But that means remembering to plug it in, which wasn't ideal (hence the vacillation).
NAS boxes look like good kit, but are obviously more expensive. If you talk about "RAID" to a normal person, they'll think you mean the brand of fly spray. You couldn't expect them to know what to do if it stopped working, and then they'd be stuck until I could get on a train and come and sort it out. So, for my own particular purpose: too expensive, too difficult, vastly excessive capabilities.
I'd still want to have a backup of a NAS: if the RAID falls over, restore the backup rather than try to recover. And now it's really starting to get expensive.
Then somebody posted that their router had a USB port, so I checked mine and found that it has one too. It looks like a perfectly normal Samba share, and seems to work at about 8 Mbit/s over 802.11g WiFi, which is slow, but for a daily update of a few emails and maybe a Word document, should be adequate.
I think I can put a 2.5" drive into a USB enclosure for less than half the cost of a decent off-the-shelf NAS, connect it directly to the laptop if they need to transfer anything big, and leave it attached to the router the rest of the time.
If a more resilient backup system turns out to be necessary, maybe we can start thinking of more comprehensive backup strategy. But this'll probably work for now, for this particular case.
Just thought I'd post some ramblings and see if they're helpful to anyone.
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Tigga
