Backups for Windows… sorted!
So I’ve finally sorted out something that’s been on my personal todo list for ages… real, automated backups for our Windows machines. My work Mac is all organized thanks to Time Machine, but something on Windows is sorely lacking. I’ve been meaning to play with Restic for ages, but never got around to it… I’ll still need that for off-site backups of course. However today I found that Windows 10 has a built-in backup tool, and get this, it’s not completely fucking terrible.
To get started, hit the start button and type “Backup” so that “Backup Settings” shows. This is another feature where it still uses partial Windows 7 style configuration windows, so obviously it’ll change a bit… but hit “more options”, then “advanced settings”. Choose “select a drive” and point it at your network location (mine is a Samba server that’s on a ZFS dataset, with snapshots behind it, so I should have adequate cryptolocker protection against everything but a determined human attacker inside my network). I then picked “exclude folders” and ditched the downloads directory, because honestly everything in there is shite, and anything I might want to keep will get moved out automatically anyway so no sense backing it up.
You can control the intervals by clicking into the second “advanced settings” screen (what the shit, Microsoft?). I set the interval to hourly (will see how that goes, performance-wise), and I told it to keep backups for three months. Hit “turn on” and let it do the first sync.
Done.
It’s not nearly as intuitive to restore things as Time Machine, but it’ll do for now!
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