hutton_d

I have a Maxtor external disk (several years old but large enough at the moment). I installed EZBack-it-up and set up a couple of backups for my own machine and the wifes. The wifes computer sees the drive as a network drive but this makes no difference.

I choose when to do the backups but you can schedule them to happen automatically. The SW is free but quite old now and I've just noticed it isn't being developed any more ... But hey, it works for me and is dead easy to use.

First backup takes a while, depending on how much you have to backup, but subsequent backups just copy new files across. I set my email client(s) to have their data files under 'My Docs' so these get automatically backed-up as well.

Dead good for free SW. See Downloads -- rdcomp.net

Dave

hutton_d

It *sounds* like what they're doing is having your 'My Docs' folder actually sit on the server itself. So they have a folder with 'Fred's My Docs', 'Bill's My Docs', etc etc in it and that gets backed up rather than your local machines. Much easier to administer - at least from a backup viewpoint. They *could* be 'synching' your local 'My Docs' with a folder on the server though, then backing up as above. I'm sure a system admin reading this could point out the pros and cons of both ways ...

I any case, there is no need for you to do this. The point of a backup is to have a second copy of your important files. If you use the 'My docs' on the backup-disk only route then you've still got the single point of failure issue. Just that it's now the external disk. So you need a way to 'copy' what you have on your computer disk (the important stuff anyway - sit down and figure out what you need to backup!) to the external disk every now and again.

Which takes us back to my last post .... that's one suggestion. A search for 'backup software' or similar will pull up loads of possibilities and I'm sure other here could recommend some. Just that I use EZBack-it-up and never used anything else. Try the online review sites as well, there should be online reviews to check out.

In your case 'synching' the files to the external disk is just what you want to do. In the 'office' case the admins do this to make it easier to back-up everybodies files in one go from one machine. In your case a backup program will do that ....

As far as I understand things anyway .....

Dave