so I finally gotten around to going to my in-law's house to set up my off-site
backup server so here's the fractal Define R3 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 uh 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 offsite 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 offsite
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 buil bu 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 Server is about 20 terab and this one is only 8x1 terab running
in raid 5 with a hot spare off of this LSI
9240 uh -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 there Force GT 60 gig SSD and then this ninth drive here is actually
only for the purpose of uh backing up
the boot drive so backing up the actual OS uh it's running Windows Home Server
uh V2 so Windows Home Server 2011 and
it's got a uh a Phenom or rather a FX
8140 so that's a lower power but still quite High quite quite powerful 8 core
chip 2 gigs of RAM uh 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 4 formula in it 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 um there's just a few things you got 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 an NCI
Tech tip episode about this the one thing that I left out in that one is
making sure that you set a static local IP for the server itself because
otherwise every time you unplug 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
um set all your user account settings
um 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 um whenever I'm forwarding the FTP Port even though it's a single port if I
use the single port forwarding on my linkis 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 got to do is make sure you're testing it so in this case I'm remote
desktop remote desk topping into my computer at home and then making sure
that I can actually connect you can see the uh 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 desk topped into using Windows
Home Server so now everything is set up for remote access to the FTP and what's
left is to uh actually set up the nightly syn
now that I'm back 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 3x or rather 8x3 tbte
storage server and this is the software
that I'm using so I want to show you guys a couple things this is web drive
this is the magical $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 got your own personal cloud so very cool stuff so all you got to do is
is add a web Drive map it to a drive letter see this is the key because
without being able to map FTP doesn't work exactly the same way as your local
as your local drive so you have to kind of trick the OS so we have mapped using
web drive this offsite 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 uh special software
configuration so we can just
sync some folder to some other folder no
problem now you can do onetime syncs with free file sync or you can actually
set up batch ones so let me just see if I no 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 I don't
know Advance yeah create batch job 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
and you create all these batch files now this is a very manual way to do it but I
couldn't find anything more elegant syn toy didn't work I did have trouble with
syn toy um deleting things that were
gone from the left folder from the right folder no matter how I set up the
relationship so um so free file sync ended up being able to do that uh even
over the FTP so you set up all these these things and then you go into the
task Schuler in Windows task Schuler there it
is Windows and you set up a nightly
task of all of the see there 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 uh in one day then it shouldn't be uh
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 sinks and that's pretty much it in terms of the uh
in terms of the software setup I mean I should show you guys what the navigation
is like from the uh the FTP so this is an FTP you'd never know
it users lonus uh find some I don't know some
video or something home videos look
there's a fly in the h so you just uh you can't play directly
from there it doesn't quite work that way but you can paste and then download
the file for you and because their uh
their internet connection's kind of not that fast you can see it's not coming
down all that fast it's 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 connection is outside the scope of this video video so
you guys will have to figure that part out on your own there's FTP security
there's uh a variety of different things what I've done is I've set a hard um IP
Black List and then I've set a white list for just myself to that remote
backup FTP so um that doesn't secure me
against everything because I'm not actually encrypting the data that I'm
transing right now but it does prevent people from just randomly logging into
that backup FTP the offsite FTP so thank you for
checking out this episode of lus tech tips and don't forget to subscribe for
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