Originally Posted By: chaosmagnet
Getting my wife to leave her laptop running might be a challenge, we'll see.

If the laptop is left powered down, no harm, no foul. The backup won't happen of course, but it won't hang the system or anything. Other computers will continue to be backed up on schedule. I have my UrBackup server configured to send me an email if any of my computers remain un-backed-up for three days. I have it set to only send me this "not being backed up" email once so I don't get spammed daily if a computer is down. Then UrBackup will send a followup email once that computer has come back online and finally been backed up again.

Say you have a computer set to be backed up once per week. And you leave the thing off for a month. Once it comes back online, UrBackup will recognize that its backup is out of date. It doesn't wait until it hits that normal weekly point. Say that computer normally backs up on Fridays, is offline for a month, then comes back online on a Monday. The first backup will happen right away, on that Monday it came back online. You also can configure an "allowable backup window" and UrBackup will not start any backups outside of that window. My window is set for 2am until 6am, when I am asleep. If a backup were to slip in and start a 5:59am though, it would keep running past the 6am end-of-window. The allowable time window governs when backups are allowed to start, not when they have to finish by. So when I said above "The first backup will happen right away", that really means "right away ... but subject to the allowable time window".

UrBackup can also back things up over the internet, so you can have remote backups. When going over the internet (as opposed to your local LAN), UrBackup encrypts all transmissions. It doesn't encrypt the actual backups on the backup server, just the transmissions over the internet. If you want your actual backups to be encrypted, just point UrBackup to an encrypted filesystem to store it's data on. Use the OS to create this encrypted filesystem, not UrBackup. I like the thinking behind UrBackup. It does backups. If you want encryption, don't expect a developer expert in backups to be an expert in encryption as well. Let an encryption developer do what they are good at, and let a backup developer do what they are good at. When you have a Jack Of All Trades piece of software that tries to do everything itself, it usually does several of those things poorly. So personally, I like the fact that UrBackup does not try to do backup encryption itself. Leave that for the encryption experts!