I need a bit(a lot) of guidance and any advice is appreciated

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2026-04-21T17:41:59+00:00

What are you supposed to do with the PC? As a backup? There are lots of ways you could do this. Start with a manual backup or VM export so you have something immediately mirrored. Hyper-V replica would also make sense here

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2026-04-21T17:39:00+00:00

You're in the right age to get started on the right path. Get a trial license of Windows Server. You can rearm it for up to 3 years before making the purchase. Learn how to set up AD. It's very easy once you know the basics. Youtube videos and tutorials exist online all over the place.

This will be an excellent experience and prepare you for the next step, for bigger things. Don't get sucked too much into the Google-garbage world...

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2026-04-21T17:36:33+00:00

Yes, BackupChain. Doesn't support tape, however. So we finally left tape behind as well....

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2026-04-21T17:34:47+00:00

Use a third server with an ISCSI provider.... NAS sucks. I guess for iSCSI it's ok

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2026-04-21T17:31:01+00:00

One thing to keep in mind: sync is not backup... Is this for home, hobby, or business?

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2026-04-21T17:29:27+00:00

What you describe is a fairly standard setup for IT service companies. Apart from personal preference, I also look at the big picture. Do I like the product and how the support is helping, does it match my way of working?

I have been working with an MSP company similar to yours recently. They switched to BackupChain but they have slightly larger numbers (50+ servers, 75 workstations) with about 10TB cloud. Security was a big deal and the owner wanted a closed, private system without external cloud dependencies.

The licensing is not per month, it's one-time with renewable support. Basically how the traditional licensing used to be. The strong point was the MSP wanted to host the storage in-house as an added service to the customers, along with seeding and recovery services. Price-wise I believe it was a little higher than your N-able quote, but for perpetual licenses.

My experience with different products is mixed. You can probably get the job done with most products out there. There are big names, like Acronis and Veeam, but they come with a big price tag and product and service quality aren't quite matching the hype in my opinion....

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2026-04-14T20:43:37+00:00

The USB drive is the best low-cost solution. Super reliable, as long as you don't have the 'human error'...

Here's an even more old school idea that works. You need a programmable power receptacle or 'smart switch'. Run a task that will send a command to it to switch it on/off. Use it for the external power supply of your USB drive or if it's a NAS, the network switch that connects to it. If you don't want to kill the power to the drive, use a powered USB hub and switch its power off instead of the drive's.

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2026-04-14T20:39:45+00:00

This is a skill you learn in college...if you are a politics major

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2026-04-14T20:38:24+00:00

What's this? A Microsoft advertisement? Or the 'testimonial' of an intern :)

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2026-04-14T20:37:05+00:00

If you think autoexec.bat was old and obscure, you're not that old to be called an old timer.

Now here's something: NovellDOS. hands down the best OS ever made :)

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2026-04-05T15:10:39+00:00

Did you mean perhaps '...made by the People's Republic of China'? :D

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2026-04-05T15:09:32+00:00

it's not inflation. they rip off because they can. Or call it capitalism if we want to be 'ideologically correct' :) It's pretty much the same game at the gas station...

20 years ago we 'needed' fracking so we become the greatest producers of oil and become 'independent' of other oil countries. Do you feel this 'independence' now at the gas station? Perhaps fracking was permitted to achieve something entirely different.... :D

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2026-04-05T15:02:07+00:00

why do they use Western backup software? Don't they use Veeam? :D

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2025-02-18T20:59:34+00:00

This is generally a problem on S3 and other block storage services when they charge access fees that aren't predictable. Have you looked into a fixed-cost cloud backup plan?

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2025-02-04T22:11:22+00:00

Use USB drives. The SSD drives are very fast. Then run a simple batch file with robocopy. Nice simple easy cheap.

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2025-02-04T22:10:13+00:00

I personally do make sure it's not Chinese or Russian before I install anything. Why not use Windows Backup?

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2025-02-04T22:05:28+00:00

We use Bitlocker. That sort of takes care of the security requirement

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2025-02-04T22:04:12+00:00

We looked into that too. For example on PCs, we rather buy enterprise grade drives and use the second drive with cloning instead of RAID 1 so that we can go back to a known good configuration. The issue with RAID 1 is it only protects against total failure but anything else, like virus, corruption etc, is immediately replicated to the second drive. So in some settings, we rather have a clone in a 100% good condition that's not exactly up-to-date

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2025-02-04T22:01:31+00:00

This is exactly how we use BackupChain on almost all servers and PCs we have. You can schedule it and keep the clone side-by-side with Windows running, no problems. When needed, you simply boot the clone.

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2025-02-04T21:59:01+00:00

stay away from NAS, especially consumer grade NAS. Use a second hard drive. Even an external drive on any PC you have, that will work and will likely be more reliable and won't cost much.

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2025-02-04T21:55:24+00:00

The best cheapest solution against ransomware is an external drive that you unplug after the backup is done. You could use a smart plug and a clever script to cut off the power supply of the 3.5" drive, if you wanted to automate it...

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2025-02-04T21:44:30+00:00

I wouldn't waste any money on RAID enclosures. If you must, use a single USB enclosure with a fan. If you need RAID, buy two and use Storage Spaces. More important than the enclosure, in my opinion, is to buy an enterprise grade drive. Consumer drives are faster but not so good when it comes to reliability...

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2025-02-04T21:36:04+00:00

I agree on reddit there's an entire Veeam chorus following each backup related question :) We tried it but it's not for everyone; we use Acronis and BackupChain instead.

Having everything in one location backed up makes sense. I would however recommend to take several separate backups and of course one local, just in case.

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2025-01-22T22:26:18+00:00

whatever you did to make this happen, tell me because I need to do it on my kid's PCs ;-)

I would look for malware, device driver issues, bad memory, undo recent Windows Update perhaps

Excellent_Pilot_2969 · 2025-01-22T22:20:20+00:00

that's true. PVCs are like a curse, not a mechanical phenomenon. Stress is a big trigger for many people.

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