Win KeepVault for WHS – Day 4
God forbid this ever happens:
You return home from a revitalizing vacation to find your once pristine home not sparkling in the sunshine’s rays due to the white emulsion on the exterior walls but instead as you approach in your 4 by 4 you see instead the once large windows broken and the white walls now black instead and the air smells of burnt barbecues. It’s then it dawns on you that there has been a fire and as your car finally comes to rest outside the drive. The house is totally burned and home is no longer home.
In this scenario it doesn’t matter how good Windows Home Server is, even with data redundancy switched on as the Home Server machine is a blackened shell and your data gone, for good!
Or is it?
One way to protect yourself against a scenario like this is to also back up WHS to the cloud, so a copy of your data is somewhere else in case a situation strikes due to fire, flood or any other trauma.
And that’s where KeepVault for Windows Home Server comes in protecting your photos and music amongst your collection of data, and whatever else you store on your Home Server.
Welcome to day 4 of our mega KeepVault for Windows Home Server giveaway and today and to have a chance of winning today’s 40GB account just leave a comment to this post before midnight tonight (GMT)* explaining a scenario where KeepVault would save the day. Hopefully your story telling is better than mine above.
*Today’s entry must be in before 23:59 GMT (15:59 Pacific Time) today, 28 May 2009 – All winners will be announced and notified on Sunday 31st May 2009.
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KeepVault would save the day in many scenarios, fire and flood being my two most feared.
Your beloved domestic Cat, treasure to the family, menace to the computer user!
Beloved moggy insists on wandering across your desk and keyboard when you are trying to work (you know they do it, it’s one of their favorite pastimes). In the process of it’s “wandering”, beloved moggy accidentally knocks your cup of tea off your desk onto your brand spanking new single drive HP LX195, the tea seaps through the gaps before you can react and frys the server and hard disk in the process. Nooooooo!!!!!!
As it only has a single drive there is no multiple disk redundancy set up and you haven’t got round to setting up that external Home Server shares backup which you’ve meaning to do, oh hec…….hang on, thank god the server was backing up to Keep Vault on a daily bais…….Keep Vault saves the day! Phew!
Only issue to solve now is the dead server and that darn Cat! :O)
The dirty snowball reluctantly parted ways with the Oort cloud a few million years ago. It wandered hither and yon until finally succumbing to Sol’s siren song, and settled into a comfortable orbit around the minor star.
Over the millennia, its orbital pathway had been altered as it swung past the inner planets, occasionally appearing in the sky over the heads of our ancestors, its tail flung haphazardly behind like a discarded apron.
And on Thursday, after thousands of orbits over millions of years, the comet set its sights on Earth. Slamming into the atmosphere at over 50,000 miles per hour takes its toll on the snowball but it doesn’t melt before it hits the ground, and when it slams into your house and instantly vaporizes your home server and everything else you own, you smile.
When your neighbors gather on the sidewalk, gaping at the hole where your house once stood proudly, your wife smiles.
As your children get off the bus in front of the crater that used to be their bedroom, they smile.
“Keep Vault’s got my back”, you tell your neighbors. “Everything else was replaceable”.
I live in the middle of tornado alley and as much as I care about my data, I’m probably not going to think about grabbing my server and running down to the basement with me if a twister is striking!
Zombie uprise…
Me thinks that if Jody’s comet hits you might need more than Keep Vault……. at 50,000 miles an hour it would probably take out the house, you, and the rest of the suburb……..plus the darn cat! :O)
For me, KeepVault would come in handy during a repeat of Hurricane Katrina.
I have no flying pteradactyls, hordes of looming zombies, incoming comets/meteors, invading extraterrestrials, etc. I’m just a normal guy with a family of 4 kids and a lovely wife.
However, I do know, first hand, what can happen in a disaster; I’ve been through a couple outright losses as well as a couple near misses. Back when I was a child, my Dad had a job opportunity out of the country. It was going to be a temporary assignment for about a year, so we put all of our stuff in storage in a large warehouse. We only took the essentials of what we needed. A few months later, we were notified that the warehouse had burned down and everything was gone.
Now things were covered by insurance, but there is no way to replace memories. My mother lost her wedding dress and all their wedding albums. All of our childhood toys were gone and so were our pictures, so I have very few pictures of me and my sister before the age of 5, just the ones that people sent after the fact. I believe the insurance company paid 5 cents per photo, but it not like you can go back and take those pictures again.
Since that time, my parents have been very good about making “off-site backups” of photos. My mother got into a routine of always making double prints of our photos and sending a copy to her sister in England. It had a double benefit of keeping us in touch but also in making sure that those photos were safe in another location.
I won’t delve too far into other disasters and close calls (we went through a “super-typhoon” and suffered some water damage from the torrential storm, we’ve been through earthquakes and a close-call with a fire that burned down hundreds of homes next to us.)
I would be foolish to say that I don’t need KeepVault. In fact, the reason I got a Windows Home Server was to make sure we had digital backups of all our important memories. Someone can pay you 5 cents a photo, but that won’t bring back what they contain. Similarly, I don’t want to lose years of photos, videos of all our family moments, scanned copies of our kids’ early schoolwork, etc. The one piece missing in this equation is the *off-site* backup.
Even with redundancy on WHS, if the house were to burn down, or if our house was ransacked by robbers, all of that could be gone. I’ve been looking into offsite storage solutions and have been waiting for WHS to have a solution of their own. I’m glad to hear that KeepVault is providing this service and even if I don’t win, I’m going to check out their service.
pah, wish I’d know previously… I put three old disks into a new whs machine, and two of them failed, losing 90% of my data 🙁 I had DVD copies of all the important stuff fortunately.
robust and reliable OFF SITE BACKUP is one of the highest priorities for even the consumer these days. What with files, music, movies, needed data, having it always accessible not only remote from a WHS but from a secondary backup location is key. I have had many times when I for some reason couldn’t REACH my WHS, this would help greatly.
Hate to lose everything on my WHS.
Not sure the context of “better” stories with these things…
I do know from personal experience that returning from a trip and finding one’s home ransacked is not a pleasant feeling. Not at all. (Fortunately we did not loose pictures, financial files, and the “boring” things like that but today computers are specifically targeted. With “identity theft” so rampant, your computer files are critical to you to be able to report losses.)
Backing up your data to an off-site location can prevent the loss of your pictures, financial data and other critical files that you do not want to loose. And having this done automatically, in the background, means that it WILL get done, not that it will just get on the list of things to do!
KeepVault would save the day for me if a tornado came through and destroyed my house, leaving my data lost to Data Heaven.
WHS keeps my files safe and KeepVault keeps my WHS safe, nothing like insurance for my insurance.
You arrive home to the smell of freshly baked cookies. As you walk into the kitchen, you see your exhausted wife sitting at the kitchen table and there is cookie dough and chocolate EVERYWHERE. It seems that while she and the kids were baking cookies, she stepped outside to talk to the neighbor. The kids took that opportunity to have a food fight and food now covers the entire house. You quickly rush into the den and look in horror at your computer equipment which has had extra special attention and now sits in a lake of chocolate. Your windows home server is fried… but delicious.
Sign me up please and help protect my photos.