Gadgetory

so I finally gotten around to going to my in-laws house to set up my off-site backup server so here's the fractal define our three that has my server config in it so I'm just going to get a little closer here I'm using manual focus today which is sort of difficult because this camera has a really clunky way of doing it but let's do a quick tour of the machine while I talk a little bit about what I'm going to be doing to make use of this off-site backup server so I'll need to actually get the side panel off for one thing and then that fan is plugged in there so I got to be careful with it so here we are the off-site backup server what's the point of this well I've got my regular home server which backs up all my data and doesn't protect me in the event of theft or fire or whatever else that can happen so I built myself a separate machine that can do nightly backups of all of my essentials and I want my so okay so my home server will do a nightly backup and then it will do a nightly sync to this one so the home timer is about 20 terabytes and this one is only eight by one terabyte running in raid five with a hot spare off of this LSI 90 240 - 4i raid card so this one's significantly smaller which means that I'm going to be only doing my essentials you know my family pictures and videos and stuff like that the boot drive is of course air force GT 60 gig SSD and then this ninth Drive here is actually only for the purpose of backing up the boot drive so backing up the actual OS it's running Windows Home Server v2 so Windows Home Server 2011 and it's got a denim or rather Rob FX 81 40 so that's a lower power but still quite high point quite powerful eight core chip two gigs of ram just just random video card and it's I mean this was the only AMD motherboard I had lying around so it's got a crosshair for formula so I'm going to be throwing it under the desk here and I'll show you guys the software configuration shortly so the software setup is actually fairly simple there's just a few things you get to do so you got to make sure that you set up your FTP server on the on the remote backup server so I did add NCIX tech tips episode about this the one thing that I left out and that one is making sure that you set a static local IP for the server itself because otherwise every time you want plug or plug in an ethernet cable it can change and that's going to mess up all your settings so you just set your FTP port set all your user account settings yeah set up your router now this is something that's a little bit tricky so I've got all my Windows Home Server ports forwarded and then what I've discovered and this is sort of weird is that whenever I'm forwarding the FTP board even though it's a single port if I use the single port forwarding on my Linksys router it doesn't work and then if I use port range forwarding and then just put the one port in there then it does work and then this is my FTP transfer so once that's all set up then what you've got to do is make sure you're testing it so in this case I'm remote desktop remote desktop into my computer at home and then making sure that I can actually connect you can see the the FTP server is seeing the connection and I'm in and I can browse and so everything is working as it should in fact here I'm just going to show you guys you know every time I do something here both of those are active so this is this is my computer at home that I'm remote desktop tin - using Windows Home Server so now everything is set up for remote access to the FTP and what's left is to actually set up the nightly sync now that I'm back at home I can show you guys what I've got set up here so for those of you who haven't seen it already that's my free buy are rather 8 by 3 terabyte storage server and this is the software that I'm using so I'll show you guys a couple things this is web drive this is the tickle $80 utility that makes this all happen this is a heck of a lot better than paying for a monthly service because you set up the hardware for yourself once you set this up and boom you've got your own personal clouds very cool stuff so all you got to do is add a web drive map into a drag letter see this is the key because without being able to map because FTP doesn't work exactly the same way as your local as your local Drive so you have to kind of trick vos so we have mapped using web drive this off-site backup server to the Z Drive with that we can use free synchronization tools in order to do the nightly sync that don't involve any kind of like special pop special software configuration so we can just sync some folder to some other folder no problem now you can do a one-time syncs with free file sync or you can actually setup batch one so just see if I don't know nope wrong one see if I remember how to do this I just did it last night yeah here we go so you set up these batch ones and then you basically yeah yeah Cree bad shot there it is okay here we go here we go here we go so you set it up put your batch settings and all that and you save as you create all these batch files now this is a very manual way to do it but I couldn't find anything more elegant sync TOI didn't work I did have trouble with sync TOI deleting things that were gone from the left folder from the right folder no matter how I set up the relationship so so free file sync ended up being able to do that even over the FTP so you set up all these things and then you go into the task scheduler in windows task scheduler there it is windows and you set up a nightly task of all of these see where they are of all of these things to run at a particular time every day now as long as you don't make huge wholesale changes in one day then it shouldn't be shouldn't be too hard on your internet connection but you should have a pretty decent upload so I have a 5 megabit upload I'm hoping to upgrade to a 15 megabit upload soon which will give me much much faster nightly syncs and that's pretty much it in terms of the in terms of the software setup and then I should show you guys what the navigation is like from the the FTP so this is an FTP you'd never know it losers Linus finds some I don't know some video or something and videos look there's a fly in the house so you just you can't play directly from there it doesn't quite work that way you can paste and then download the file for you and because they're there internet connection is kind of not that fast you can see it's not coming down all that fast as a 960 Meg file so I think you guys get the point but you can see that this behaves like a native Windows transfer which is what makes all this sort of magically come together so thank you oh okay right so security securing your connections outside the scope of this video so you guys will have to figure that part out on your own there's FTP security there's a variety of different things what I've done is I've set a hard IP blacklist and then I've set a whitelist for just myself to that remote backup FTP so that doesn't secure me against everything because I'm not actually encrypting the data that I'm transferring right now but it does prevent people from just randomly logging into that backup FTP by the off-site FTP so thank you for checking out this episode of Linus tech tips and don't forget to subscribe for more boxing's reviews and other computer videos