Problem in making a backup to cloud or home NAS is security. If your home network is compromised, the attacker can read your work computers backup files. Same problem is if you backup your computer to cloud.
To solve that problem you can encrypt the backup. I'm using Truecrypt but you can use the same method with other on-the-fly encryption software also. When the backup is saved as encrypted and the encryption is done in your work computer, the cloud or NAS does not have the encryption key and cannot read your backup. But you have to save the encryption key to somewhere else than your work computer. You don't want to loose your encryption key :)
At first, mount your NAS location(Backupdirectory) as local disk. You can of course use also other volume name than f:
net use f: \\NAS\Backupdirectory
In that directory create a Truecrypt file container (I'm not going that in detail). In this example file containers file name is Backup.tc.
Then you simply mount that file as local disk. The parameter /lg mounts the file container as disk G:
start "Truecrypt" /MIN "C:\Program Files\TrueCrypt\truecrypt" /q /p "Your truecypt password" /lg /v F:\Backup.tc
Here is the catch. Because it is now mounted as local disk, Windows 7 backup won't allow you to backup to that disk. You have to make it first as net share:
net share Backup=G:\ /GRANT:%USERNAME%,FULL
Now you can access it as \\%COMPUTERNAME%\Backup
You can start the backup:
WBADMIN START BACKUP -backupTarget:\\%COMPUTERNAME%\Backup -include:C: -allCritical -quiet -vssFull
Same works also in Windows 8. Windows 8 also has File History backup that is more like file sync with revision history and you can use the same \\%COMPUTERNAME%\Backup as destination directory for it.
Many people use notebook computers nowadays only with wi-fi and with this method it is easy to make automatic backups run at night. With 802.11n wi-fi whole 140GB backup takes about 3-4 hours.
To solve that problem you can encrypt the backup. I'm using Truecrypt but you can use the same method with other on-the-fly encryption software also. When the backup is saved as encrypted and the encryption is done in your work computer, the cloud or NAS does not have the encryption key and cannot read your backup. But you have to save the encryption key to somewhere else than your work computer. You don't want to loose your encryption key :)
At first, mount your NAS location(Backupdirectory) as local disk. You can of course use also other volume name than f:
net use f: \\NAS\Backupdirectory
In that directory create a Truecrypt file container (I'm not going that in detail). In this example file containers file name is Backup.tc.
Then you simply mount that file as local disk. The parameter /lg mounts the file container as disk G:
start "Truecrypt" /MIN "C:\Program Files\TrueCrypt\truecrypt" /q /p "Your truecypt password" /lg /v F:\Backup.tc
Here is the catch. Because it is now mounted as local disk, Windows 7 backup won't allow you to backup to that disk. You have to make it first as net share:
net share Backup=G:\ /GRANT:%USERNAME%,FULL
Now you can access it as \\%COMPUTERNAME%\Backup
You can start the backup:
WBADMIN START BACKUP -backupTarget:\\%COMPUTERNAME%\Backup -include:C: -allCritical -quiet -vssFull
Same works also in Windows 8. Windows 8 also has File History backup that is more like file sync with revision history and you can use the same \\%COMPUTERNAME%\Backup as destination directory for it.
Many people use notebook computers nowadays only with wi-fi and with this method it is easy to make automatic backups run at night. With 802.11n wi-fi whole 140GB backup takes about 3-4 hours.
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