Backup your PC using other PCs
CREATE AUTOMATED BACKUPS FOR ALL YOUR SYSTEMS USING YOUR HOME NETWORK.
WHEN CRASHPLAN DISCONTINUED its Home product, it was a big blow to DIYers. CrashPlan was a backup software solution with one feature that really set it apart from the rest: the ability to set another PC as a backup target.
You could back up your PC to your mother’s PC over the internet, and she could back up her PC to yours. You could back up your office PC with your travel laptop, and vice versa. That way your could create your own little resilient cloud backup system, without the annual cost or trust issues of using a cloud service like Carbonite or Mozy.
We’ve been searching for an alternative to CrashPlan, and so far the best we’ve found is a great little backup app called BuddyBackup ( In some ways it’s even an improvement on CrashPlan (for example, in its continuous backup option).
So let’s take a look at how you might use BuddyBackup to create your own cloud backup network.
WHAT BUDDYBACKUP DOES
While BuddyBackup can function as a regular local backup tool, able to create backups on USB drives and NAS drives, where it really shines is in the Buddy system. As with CrashPlan, what you do is connect with other trusted users – friends and family members.
You each create accounts, and add each other to your “buddy” lists. Once you’ve done that, you can use each other’s PCs as a backup target. That is to say, you can back up your PC over the internet onto the hard drive of one (or several) of your buddies, while they can back up their computers onto yours.
Backups are encrypted, of course, so even though your files may be backed up onto another computer the owner of that computer won’t be able to read them. You can also set limits on the amount of hard drive space used.
Remote backups work just like regular backups, even including older versions of files. You can recover files over the internet as well, just by logging onto you your account and accessing the remote backups linked to it.
SETTING UP BUDDYBACKUP
BuddyBackup is thankfully quite easy to set up. If you’ve ever used a regular backup tool you should have no trouble coming to grips with it. The only real added twist is the ability to add buddies, who will serve as backup targets.
Start by heading to and downloading, installing and running the app. When you first start the app, you’ll be asked to log in or create a new account.
This is mandatory – the account is how you connect to buddies. You can choose, when you create the account, to have a copy of the password stored on the BuddyBackup server. Choosing yes means that you’ll be able to recover the password and more easily migrate to a new system. But if you don’t trust BuddyBackup with your password, you can choose no. Choose the files you want to backup. By default it chooses just your Documents directory in Windows. You can add additional folders, but remember: if you’re backing up over the internet, the more files you choose, the more bandwidth it will use. Note that this list is not set in stone – you can change the selected folders at any time by clicking on the Choose Backups tab. Click Finish when you’ve selected your folders. Before we add buddies, there are just a few things you might want to check. The first is the Backup space available. This is the amount of space, in total, that other people can use on your system for backups. It also the maximum amount of data you can upload to one of your buddies. You can’t set the upload/ storage number independently – the limit you put applies both the local and remote storage. We should note here that USB and local drives are not included in this limit. You can back up as much as you want to a USB drive and it will ignore the limit.
BuddyBackup defaults to a relatively paltry 10GB total. Given that most people probably took more than 10GB of photos just this last Christmas, it’s probably worth increasing this amount.
To set the number just click on the ‘Increase backup/shared space’ link on the Home tab and enter a new limit. The other thing you might want to do is set the maximum number of backups. In theory, if you have five buddies, you can have five backups of your files on those buddies. That’s probably overkill, so you’ll want to set a limit on the maximum number of backups. Once you do that, BuddyBackup can automatically decide who gets backups based on the amount of storage space available, or you can manually set where the backups go.
Next to each Backup up folder name on the Home tab there’s an Options button. Click on it to bring the backup options. The default number of backup copies is two, and you can set up to five. If you want to specify which buddies get the backups, click on the Backup to: field and select Manage groups. There you can create backup groups and add selected buddies to a given group. Then that group name will appear in the ‘Backup to:’ field. Of course, you can’t create groups until you have buddies, so you might have to come back to this. It’s time to add buddies. On the Home screen, click on Add buddy. A “buddy” can be either a person, or it can be a USB or external drive (so if you want to do a local backup, you still use the “Add buddy” button to add a target drive.)
You’ll be given an option: Backup to a buddy, or Backup to a USB drive. Assuming you want to add a person to your buddy list, choose the first option. Enter the email address of the person you want to add to your buddy list. If they have a registered BuddyBackup account under that email address, then they’ll get an email notification that you want to become a buddy. If they accept, then buddies you shall be. If they don’t have an account, you’ll be able to send them an invitation email to set up the app.
Buddies will appear in your buddies list on the right side of the home page. You can also, if you like, invite everyone on your email list. To do that click on Invite Buddies at the top right of the Buddies list. This starts a wizard to batch invite and from your email list.
Once the buddies are added, the backup process should start immediately. BuddyBackup uses continuous backups, so files are backed up as soon as they change.
That should get you pretty well started with BuddyBackup. There’s more to explore: select Tools->Options to configure additional settings, like ignore file options, buddy blocking/removal and permissions, bandwidth limits, versioning and file expiry. There is some cool Windows File Explorer integration, with little icons indicating backup status as well as the capacity to right click on folders and select a context menu item to add them to the backup schedule. There’s also a Guest Mode that gets installed with the main app – running it will allow another user (a guest) to access their backup and grab files. It’s a great tool overall, and if you’re not using a cloud backup service, it comes highly recommended.