Hello

I need to find a solution to perform a daily automated backup of a friend's Windows8 host to her parents' house in case of a burglary/fire/flood.

The data don't need to be encrypted, and the only feature she needs is that the backup should remember the last 3 version of each file in case she needs to go back to an older version of a given file.

Also, both her place and her parents' are connected to the Net through ADSL and the modem acts as NAT firewall. I guess that means I'll have to open a port on her parents' modem so that the Windows-side backup application can connect to the NAS.

What cheap, Linux-based solution would you recommend for this use?

Should I go for ready-to-use solutions such as Synology (DiskStation DS110j?) or Buffalo, or build one with eg. Arduino, RaspberryPi, BeagleBoard, etc.?

Thank you.

ive used hundreds of Buffalo Linkstations for backing up Linux servers all across the USA. They handle natively FTP, SAMBA, CIFS/NTFS, and have web access built in as well.

also if you wish to hack them you can gain ssh access including the use of ssh keys for direct rsync and other goodies. they do run Linux as their OS, plus they come with a backup solution for the MS world that you can just install on the win8 box and go from there.

Thanks for the tip. I'll check their Linkstation Live because she'll only need a single drive.

Alternatively, what do you think of the Synology DiskStation DS112j?

remember its not about storage capabilities in a NAS its about redundancy. in other words if that one disk dies you loose 100% of your backup data. i never run a backup of any kind of critical data on less then a RAID 1/0 aka RAID 10 for that you need a 4 disk solution, but if its just pictures or other simple documents that can be relatively reproduced, then a single disk is perfect.

the synology looks nice too.

Right, but it's just for personal use. She'd have to really be unlucky to lose both her original files and the NAS at the same time.

ok, as long as the information is there to make the choice. i personally have my data backup to multiple locations. a NAS is next on my list for backup storage, but ill be getting one of the bigger ones so i can backup my media as well as personal files/photos/documents/etc...