Good but easy backup solutions

Zifnab

My father has asked me to come up with a backup solution for both his home PC and the 4 computers at his office. He just had a hard drive die on him and has 'seen the light', so to speak. The problem here is that I have no direct experience with backup software or hardware, since I do everything the old-fashioned way (copy/paste to external drive). The other thing to remember is that neither he nor his secretaries know about computers besides turning them on and Hey, Internet!

I'd like to have the home setup be an external drive and some sort of backup software that will hopefully let him one-click backup any files or folders I want it to. Freeware is obviously best, but ease of use is much more important and we will pay for that if need be.

For the office setup, since we're dealing with multiple computers, I'm thinking of a NAS box, either bought or homebrew, with the same sort of software setup. This means that I need software that's capable of backing up to a network drive as well as to something local to the machine.

What I'm looking for is suggestions for software that will let me do what I want to do. Personal experience is best, but if you know of something great that you haven't used, I'll check it out. Any better ideas on how to set this up are also welcome. Also, since someone will jump on this, when I say 'office', he owns the business, so I'm basically the only IT dept to worry about.

AngelHedgie

Most external drives now come with backup software - some are even configured for "one touch" operation (press a button, drive runs backup.) You should also look for a drive that also encrypts the data as well, if we're talking about a computer that can be used for business.

As for the business, I'm assuming we're talking a relatively small business where you're mainly running XP. In that case, I'd recommend something like the MyBook World Edition, which basically is a contained package that has everything. Not only is it 1 TB in size (and there's a 2 TB version as well), it's also capable of adding another drive via USB.

enderwiggin13

SecondCopy (http://www.centered.com/) is a good small-business backup program. Can use local or networked sources and runs as a small applet in the background keeping required files updated.

amateurhour

Another good option would just be an external backup server. Have the pc's networked to the server, which nowadays an entry level server with 1tb of storage can be had for under a thousand. You can have it set up with active directory, place the computers in a group, and either use backup software like ghost do the job, or just a simple ntbackup run every night, or every week.

Richard M. Nixon

At work we use http://areca.sourceforge.net/

It's opensource and free. Works extraordinarily well. It'll do incremental backups to compressed folders. Admittedly, we only use it for our 'server' (a desktop pc that nobody is using) but it should work for what your dad has. It's slightly more involved than 'one click' but as long as he remembers to do it on a pretty regular basis, it should go swimmingly. Set up took me about an hour when I first got it.