By David Gewirtz
There's a new family in town. The Jones family has a lot more computers than most families of even a few years ago, and therefore also has a lot more issues of backup and security.
Here at Computing Unplugged, we put together a composite of this new kind of computer-overburdened family. We then spent the last year or so testing a variety of solutions in order to determine a good overall mix of reliable backup solutions.
This week, we'll talk about the computing environment. In the next few weeks, we'll talk about each of the various solutions and how they worked out (and some that failed miserably).
Meet the Joneses
Joan Jones is the mom. She attends college, does some part-time bookkeeping work for a few clients from home. She has two computers, a laptop she takes to school and a desktop she works on in her home office.
Joan recently changed things up. She decided she wanted to turn her laptop into a second, downstairs desktop-equivalent and bought a netbook to take to school.
So, we're at three computers, already.
Josh Jones works at the office, but brings work home. He, too, has two computers. His laptop is sometimes brought to work, but he usually brings work home on flash drives.
His office doesn't take responsibility for backing up the laptop. His desktop is used for PC gaming, photo editing and organizing, and other high-end CPU-intensive tasks. This is a Windows Vista 64 machine, which he plans to upgrade to Windows 7 next year.
Josh also has a Mac, which he uses exclusively to run some Mac-specific software he sometimes needs for work. It should be backed up, but it's not used all that often. Other than the Mac, all the other machines in the family are PCs running XP or Windows 7.
We're up to six computers.
Joan and Josh have a teen son, Jason, who also has two computers. One is a relatively older machine that's now tricked out to act as a gaming server for his friends.
Teen Jason also has a relatively powerful gaming rig used to play games, do his homework, and organize his music. He also Twitters and Facebooks to a level his parents barely understand.
Jason is computer-aware and wants to backup his homework and music, as well as all the hard-to-reproduce settings on his server (which he never wants to turn off, because people are always playing on it).
Jane is the Jones' pre-teen daughter. Jane has a hand-me-down PC from Dad. She does homework on it, and visits Encyclopedia Britannica (teachers at her school virtually foam at the mouth at mentions of Wikipedia).
Little Jane rarely plays games, but does like watching TV episodes on the PC. This PC is located in the family room, where the parents can watch her while she's online. She often watches her PC while her parents watch TV on the big screen TV.
