Recommendation Needed, Desktop Backp

Balancing your needs with simplicity and the small scale you are working with, I'd say take a look at an Acronis subscription. Their tools are decent quality and includes cloud backup (which you say you don't want, but it's encrypted so take another look at the convenience as only delta is uploaded for daily backups).

I haven't used them for a few years, but had only positive experience when I used them up until mid 2021. Their offering is very well aligned with their asking price.

If you insist on not using cloud storage, save the images to a local drive. You can attach a drive permanently, and automate a daily image backup.

If you want to manage everything including manually managing the OS and the RAID setup then you will need a small server. I don't recommend it though.

I would look at something like a Synology for this a small 4 bay NAS, and use that for backup, it would be easier to setup and manage then trying to do it manually.

Synology has a backup tool that it provides or you can use pretty much any other solution you want and set it up as a file share location for backup.

For drives depending on the model you can add SSD drive for a cache for performance, but for backups I think regular hard drives made for NAS would be sufficient.

You have effectively 2 laptops. Right? And a couple spares that are spares, you don't generate new data on them, right? So 2 laptops.

Stick a USB drive on each machine, run the free Veeam Endpoint Backup software and backup to the USB drive. Swap it out when desired. Take it off site if desired.

Forget the RAID stuff, a simple external SSD will be fine for backups, especially if you cycle a couple of them and you have spare laptops. No need for raid on the laptops either, that is a pain and provides little benefit for the complexity if you already have good backups. This is assuming your windows install is just a plain Windows 10/11 install with a few apps installed for your work stuff and nothing else. Heck, it's almost not even worth doing full backups if that is the case. Just backup your important files and you can reinstall Windows to a fresh drive/machine in 10 minutes anyway. Restore your files and you're done.

Keep it simple. I've been using the Veeam Free Endpoint Backup software for over 5 years now and it works great. Never had an issue that wasn't caused by something simple like a dying USB drive or whatever. The software has been totally reliable.

OK yeah in that case, you probably just need more external drives. I still would not worry about it to that degree though unless you find a really good hardware solution for the external drives. So far all the external RAID enclosures I have seen have been either complete junk that randomly blows all your data or they are the price and complexity of a NAS so you might as well just have a NAS and back that up on to a USB drive.

I haven't used Macrium for more than basic drive cloning for hardware migration but I would guess they have a decent backup product. I do just fine with Veeam Free Endpoint Backup on my mix of personal machines and a few one-off work machines that don't play well with enterprise backup software or can't do network backups for whatever reason.

To avoiding cloud storage, I have the following simple backup system in place. Storage is using USB type C hubs which take NVMe drives, in this case Sabrent hubs and 2GB drives. Connected is only made to synchronise, then disconnected and stored. I use the common three generations of record, with one of them off site. Rather than creating an image file, I use the excellent Free File Sync in Mirror mode to make a direct copy. This takes only a minute or two to update the record, since only changes are made. You can immediately check individual files, and verify the file data with explorer etc.


I store data as above, but also take an image of the OS after major updates. Clearly this takes longer, but is necessary less often.

I"ll give another vote for Veeam backup community edition. You can setup each machine independently if you want, but if you do have a central computer "server" available, that can be used to make sure things are backup up as expected. You can backup to a NAS or an attached drive or any number of other options and the backups themselves are pretty painless. Recovery is pretty smooth as well. I have used Acronis and Veeam and settled in on Veeam here.

@gpriatko you gotta do what you think it safe for you, but at that level of concern, you might want to consider taking a few classes and writing your own program since I doubt you can find any company without at least a tangential tie to something questionable somewhere. I don't know what your company handles to require more scrutiny than the DoD, but to each their own. Veeam Certifications Veeam Gov. Landing page . Those are two Veeam pages, so I guess don't trust what they say and verify them with the agencies if you are at that kind of level.

Think about it this way: Their obvious connection to Russia in the past invited a LOT of curiosity and inspection and they are still in business. How many software packages did people look at and find that they sent data back to China? (A lot) But as far as I have heard, no one found anything wrong with Veeam. It's really quite trivial to just run stuff on a honeypot network and watch for it to do anything and capture it all so unless they made their stuff so it only uploads data once every ten years... it's probably ok. Given how many researchers are out there right now looking for the next big chance for clout and even money for discovering a vulnerbility or intentional back door or security violation, if there is something to be found, it will be sooner or later. The additional scrutiny from the association with Russia actually makes me trust them a bit more when combined with their popularity. Enough people using it, enough people looking for holes in it, yeah. You would expect to find the problems if there were any.

Plenty of ways of getting to the end result on this. Classic fileserver sharing folders with a tape/usb drives for off site.

gpriatko said:

My issue is that one of my partners and I are day traders. We've got four laptops to backup, two Win11 Pro and two Win12 Pro.

Click to expand...

Couldn't you just use that time machine you have and buy a quantum backup unit?

Jokes aside it seems you're making a lot of the classic 'I know what I'm doing because I was in IT' assumptions for your current setup, what you plan and how you see it going in the original post. For a start, RAID1 on laptops - what is this meant to achieve?!? Do you really believe that will make your laptops more mission-critical? Nothing else you mention is fit for purpose for an amateur daycare, let alone an amateur day trader, while rejecting the more up to date suggestions everyone has made so far.

I'm a heavily regulated business (tho now quite hands-off) and we gave up on tapes a while ago, though I didn't pull them out of the vault to a less secure location until recently. I liked them because we know where they are, but the draw of cloud and the business as well as practical sense it makes, again even for a heavily regulated business in the investment sector, is frankly too great now. And we definitely don't store backups on Windows File History or NAS's, kek

Even my own stash at home (everything at home that's work related is handled thru work infrastructure, not this) is backed up first to a local appliance for quick rollbacks and bare metal restore, then the same appliance squirts a deduplicated backup to the backup provider's cloud - which is maybe the model you as a proper small business could be aiming for, and that'll be best done thru an MSP.

Now if money is an issue / you aren't a proper business in this sector / you don't like solutions like Veeam (that could technically be a legit concern atm) / you want to keep it simple, then I'd say a standalone NAS which can be your local backup target, which can then optionally (but obviously recommended) be backed up to a cloud of your choice. Synology NAS's aren't in the least bit challenging to install or maintain and I'm sure even you can do it, and they even have their own integrated cloud backup service - C2 - in addition to supporting other popular cloud services, and cloud data retrieval can be done in-NAS or directly on a client device. Synology say as long as you're shlepping entire backup images to and from their cloud service the data is e2ee and ear - I think they have a white paper on this if you want to look at it. That's about the most DIY I would certainly consider.