Online Backup strategy for family individuals

Question

The majority of my family, including myself, uses Dropbox and Syncplicity free accounts for our syncing needs. However our backup strategy is pretty non-existent, we all have access (via webDav) to our qnap nas located at home, however we copy files accross when we can remember to do so, terrible I know.

Is there tools like CrashPlan or Spideroak that allows each the accomodation of each family members syncing and back-up needs under one main account? I'm not sure how this would work, as each family member would need a seperate sub-account or would I manage each computer's syncing and backup lists from a single account? Any thoughts?

Answer 1

If your data is small enough, why not just use DropBox for backup? It syncs in real time, and all the information is stored online.

Answer 2

It depends if you want online storage and syncing which is just a copy of the data, or backup which involves retention and the ability to go back to a point in time.

Crashplan currently offers unlimited storage on a family account. It's only limited by the privacy aspect - the backup account admin has access to all backed up data, but you can have up to 10 machines in 'one household' backing up 'unlimited' data under the one plan. I haven't used it with more than one user yet, but I strongly suspect you would have separate backup sets per person, and that they would be isolated and run independently.

Having all this backing up on-line, may severely affect your internet connection. QoS may be useful if you can configure it in your router.

Answer 3

If you are using CrashPlan, you can connect to its background service running on a networked machine. Here is more information:

http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/how_to/configure_a_headless_client