Backup Laptop to NAS

[nannynick]

I have an old laptop which I want to backup to my Network drive. I want to be able to recover individual files should I find that I need something which was on the laptop.

Any recommendations for software, ideally Free or low cost, that can backup an image of the drive on the laptop (windows7) to a NAS and recover individual files to another computer (win8) when accessing that drive image.

[NetworkGuy]

I'm guessing the Win 7 laptop is running Home rather than 'Professional' or 'Ultimate' (as this Microsoft page hypes up the new Backup and Restore with Windows 7). Must admit I have a 2 TB NAS and am primarily copying podcasts from this (500 GB, 30 GB free) iMac, only to free up space, and not tried backup from any Win 7 systems (I know one or two of the second hand laptops and SFF systems are running suitable versions that should allow network backup).

Will carry on looking - I too have lots of files on over a dozen systems, some of which are important for tax reasons, if nothing else! So new years resolution is to sort myself out, perhaps with another 6 TB NAS box and take backups seriously (and get rid of duplicate copies on multiple PCs).

[nannynick]

Yes Win7 Home edition.
I use the NAS like you do but thought it useful for storing system backups as well as video/audio.

[NetworkGuy]

I have another phone line + broadband being installed tomorrow so have 24 hours of clutter / desks / bookcases moving to do... 3 years here and still boxes which have not been opened, so probably some things I can throw / sell / give to charity (!)

[nannynick]

Have been playing with AOMEI Backupper. It creates a backup image, saves it to the NAS, then lets you Mount the Image as a drive so you can pull individual files off.

www.backup-utility.com/

[NetworkGuy]

Have been busy this weekend with new line and a couple of Android phones (one to pass on to my sister to replace hers, which is 2 years old and has a tiny screen).

Came across an article regarding backup software for using Amazon's Glacier service (large scale backup, intended for archiving rather than regular retrieval, most suited to backing up 100s of GB but charges below 20 quid a year (unless you start pulling files from storage). Anyway will hunt for the article again...

The Glacier service is something I plan to use to back up the 2.5 TB of current storage and then I'll be adding 4 TB or 6 TB for a new project. As soon as I find the article, I'll post a link - it was comparing a number of products offering backups with complete backups (say monthly) and incremental backups (daily). Of course with the Glacier service, one could do complete backups every quarter or 6 months and incremental in between, as they'd be backups of ones current backups, IYSWIM.

[borisgudanov]

You say you want to restore individual files at different times and to different machines with different OS (well, OS versions). Is that right? If so I wouldn't back it up as an image but as a straightforward copy of the filesystem. If you had an image and wanted to select individual files from it you'd be in the game of mounting it as a filesystem. I don't even know if you can do that in Windows; it's a pain in the arse though because the system needs to be told about the virtual geometry of the image file and then has to do all the sums that your disk drive firmware would do if it were a physical disk. It's definitely possible on Linux, but TBH I'd just copy the files to the backup volume and maybe compress them there, since Windows (and Linux) can show you a compressed filestore as though it were native. You can do that from the file manager in any OS and in Windows set it up with suitable drive letters.

I don't like NAS devices, they have pretty limited functionality. An old or cheap computer serves as a fileserver and whatever other kind of server you need, and could use Windows or Linux. You could expose folders you accessed frequently on a simple intranet web page with a login, for example. I have among other things a code repository, music service, print server, databases and E-mail server all on a Raspberry Pi with a 1Tb USB drive and change from £100.