How to Backup your Windows PC to an Unraid Server using Windows Backup

hi guys and welcome to another video now in this video we're going to be looking at how to create windows backups automatically to an un-raid server we're not only going to be looking at making full image backups but also file history backups as well sounds interesting then let's get started now for decades now our pcs have been a really important part of our lives and as time goes on we seem to get more and more important data onto our home pcs and so think to yourself just what would happen right now if while i'm speaking to you on this video the hard drive on your pc just totally failed and you couldn't access any of your data or programs at all well it certainly wouldn't make for a very fun day so now we all know that we should have backups of our important data but for many people it's just something they keep on putting off thinking i'll be all right i'll do it next week never really thinking that in that time that's when disaster could strike so it seems for many people making backups is something they know they should be doing but in many cases they just don't get around to doing it well i think there's a few reasons why people just don't have a good backup system in place and those are they think it's going to be difficult and expensive to set up they think they're too busy using their pc to stop and do a backup and also i think some people just think that if their pc isn't very old well there's no chance that it could fail on them well no matter how new or old your pc is well it's still subject to failure viruses or even accidental deletion by the user and if you're using your pc well it can back up in the background no need to stop using it while a backup runs and it's really quite easy to actually set up within windows all the backup software is already part of the operating system and if you're running an unraid server you don't need to buy any extra hardware you can backup directly over the network onto the server so not only is that good that you don't have to actually buy like an external hard drive and plug it in whenever you're on the same network your pc is just going to back up in the background and you don't have to do anything at all now there's two different types of backups that we're going to do there's a full image backup which as the name implies makes a full backup of the image of your pc that includes all of the programs all of the files and so if your pc fails you can use that backup to restore everything back onto the pc as it was at the time of the backup but windows also has something called a file history backup and what this does is to backup selected files and folders keeping the various versions so should you say edit a spreadsheet save it and then wish you could go back to the previous version well you can do just that so similar in function to apple's time machine okay so let's dive in and get this set up i'm going to go across onto my unraid server now the first thing i'm going to do before creating any shares or anything is i'm going to go across over onto users here and i'm going to create a new user so i'm going to click on to add user here and the user can be anything we want as i'm going to be backing up my laptop i'm just going to make this user called laptop and i'm going to create a password with that done i'm going to click on to add and now when windows connects to the unraid server to make its backups i'm going to make sure it uses this user here now the next thing we want to do is on the array we need to create a share so let's click onto shares here and down at the bottom here i'm going to click add share and i'm going to call this backups and then click add share and now we need to scroll down to smb security settings here and we need to set export to bs so what this does is allow windows to be able to see this as a network share now for security i'm going to leave it on public for the moment and i'm going to click on to apply and now we can click onto done and we can see the shares being created here now if we go to the right hand side here and click on to view and we can see that this share is empty there's nothing here so in my backup share i'm going to create some other locations as well i'm going to do that using windows but before we go ahead and do that i want to just take note of what the ip address is of the unraid server so let's go to settings and then network settings and take a note of the ip address of our server and you can see here under ipv4 address that my ip address is 10.10.20.199 so make a note of your ip then minimize the unraid web ui so now i'm going to open up the file explorer here and under network here i'm going to go to prime which is my server and i'm going to go to backups here and then inside here i'm going to create a folder and i'm going to call that windows basically because in the backup share i might want to have other systems as well so calling it specifically windows seems like a good idea then inside this folder i'm going to create two subfolders the first called full backups and the second called file history so now obviously looking at the share on unraid we can see the first folder windows and those two subfolders here so with that done now i'm going to map to these locations here so i'm going to click onto this pc computer then map network drive so now i'm going to put backslash backslash and the ip address of the server that i've just copied then backslash and the name of the share that was backups and if we look at that share the folder is windows then we need to put another backslash and then the folder full backups now we can choose a drive letter doesn't matter which you choose i'm going to use f for full backups and then click on to finish okay so there's the first map network location done so again i'm going to click on to this pc computer map network drive then i'm going to click on the downward arrow here and choose the location that i just put in i'm going to delete off full backups and map to the folder file history and i'm going to map this to drive letter g okay so now we've got both locations maps on the windows pc so now we can close these windows and in the search bar here i'm going to type backups and here i'm going to click onto backup settings and the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to back up my file history so i'm going to click on here where it says add drive now i can see the two network drives i created so i'm going to choose this one here file history selecting it kind of looks like nothing's happening and you don't see anything here so we need to click onto here where it says more options and we can see here the location i chose and we can see there's 14.5 terabytes free there and the data's not yet backed up but before we do anything let's change some settings here this gives us the backup options and the first thing i'm going to do is choose how often that my files are backed up by default it's every hour which i'm going to leave it as that but you can change it to more often or less frequent depending on your needs now we can choose how long to keep the backups for by default is set forever i'm going to change this to 6 months now by default these are the folders the windows backup has picked up to be backed up for me now a lot of these i don't want to actually have so you can click onto them and click remove so i'll just quickly remove all of the folders that are not bothered about being backed up okay that looks good that just leaves the folders i do want backing up now windows will automatically choose folders to be backed up you can also manually specify folders yourself and to do that you just click on here add folder and you can browse and add any extra folders that you want to be included in the backup now also something quite useful is you can exclude a folder so for example if there's something in one of these folders that you don't want to be backed up you can exclude a folder from within these by clicking this button and inside emulation here if i didn't want this folder to be included i could just click onto that okay so with that done we can see that no data has been backed up yet because it hasn't been an hour since this is set up so what i can do is i can just click back up now to start off the process and this will just run in the background and then run every hour backing up all my files and anything that changes so i can close this window now and just use my pc as normal so after the file history backups had time to complete if we go back to backups here we can see here now the date and time of the last backup now if we scroll down to the bottom here you can see here where it says backup to a different drive now if we wanted to back up to a different drive then we'd have to click on stop using this drive here and also if you deleted something and you want to get it back well then to restore files at the bottom here we can click on restore files from a current backup and that will allow us to restore files from our file history so obviously file history is quite useful but you might want to actually make a complete backup of your whole system and to do that if we go down to the bottom here and under related settings click on see advanced settings here again because we've set up file history we can see more information about file history here and if we wanted to turn it off well we could turn it off here but what we're looking for to make a full system image is at the bottom here where it says system image backup let's click onto that and here we see a section where it says windows backup has not been set up so you might be thinking hey that's a bit weird space invader didn't you just set up backup a moment ago well file history is different to the windows backup windows backup makes a complete system image while the file history makes backups of different versions of your files so to create a system backup say we want to click on here where it says setup backup and here windows allows us to choose from two different locations we're given the option to choose either a physical drive or we can click on here where it says save on network so now we need to click onto browse to browse through the network and here's my server prime i'm going to click on to that there's the share backups windows and this time i'm going to use the folder full backups here now at the beginning of the video i set up a user i set up the one laptop and that's why i did that because windows insists that we put in our network credentials great so now in the backup destination i can see that location there we can see that it's the selected one because it's highlighted so with that done let's click onto next now we get two options here of what to back up now i'm going to leave it on let windows choose which is the recommended thing to do this will back up all of my libraries as well as making a system image which i can restore the whole computer from now for more granular control you can click on to let me choose but like i said for me i'm using the recommended settings by default here we can see the schedule is to run sunday at 9 00 pm if you want to change that then just click on change schedule here and you can choose when and how often that the backup system is going to run now one thing to note here is that we need a system repair disk in order to restore a system image because obviously if our system goes down we weren't ready to boot to windows and we'll need that system repair disk and also only one system image can be stored at the backup location that's something to keep in mind okay with that done i can click on save settings and run backup and windows will start making my system backup straight away right no one can be bothered to watch my computer do a backup so let's speed through this okay good the backup's all finished now we can see here the size that the backup takes up is taking up 84 gigs for me and here we can see a little bit of information when the next backup is the last backup that kind of thing and underneath here we've got this section restore where we can actually restore files from the backup back onto our pc now this is fairly similar to file history except you don't get the versions now obviously as well if you need to restore a full image backup you can't do it from the pc and earlier on i mentioned that you need to create a recovery image but the easiest thing to do is just use the windows 10 iso image from a usb flash drive so you just boot into the windows iso like this click onto next and instead of clicking install now you just click repair your computer and from here click on to troubleshoot and here we've got the option system image recovery now when you click onto here it will say it can't find an image on this computer that's because it's not on the computer it's on the network so just click cancel select a system image and click next and here click onto advanced and then you get the option to install the image over the network now obviously got to be connected to the network i don't think you can do this over wi-fi and here you just put in the network location of your system backup now as my laptop only has wi-fi i can't go any further than this so if you only have access to wi-fi how could you restore the backup well probably the easiest thing to do would be just to copy of the files from your full backup share onto an external hard drive plug it into the laptop and do it that way so microsoft windows backup software it does have some downsides and to be honest it isn't the best software out there but the upside is everyone who runs windows has already got this software and it's fairly easy to set up now if you're wondering what my favorite windows backup software is well that's something called your backup which we run in a docker container and i will be doing a video on that not the next video because the next one is about using time machine on mac but the video after that we'll be looking at your backup which in my opinion is the best it's open source and the downside being maybe it's a little bit more difficult to set up but for now that's all i've got and that's the end of this video now i really hope you enjoyed the video if you did then please hit the like button subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and share this video with anyone else who you think might like it and find it useful now i want to give a huge thanks to all of my patrons and supporters out there who make these videos possible thank you so much guys for supporting me i really really do appreciate it anyway guys it's time for me to go now but whatever you're up to for the rest of the day i hope it's good and i'll catch you in the next video

Channel: Spaceinvader One

Views: 40,887

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Id: 5bwrd7dHjqs

Length: 15min 6sec (906 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 08 2022