 So I've finally gotten around to going to my in-laws house to set up my off-site backup server. So here's the Fractal Define R3 that has my server config in it. So I'm just going to get a little closer here. I'm using manual focus today which is sort of difficult because this camera has a really clunky way of doing it. But let's do a quick tour of the machine while I talk a little bit about what I'm going to be doing to make use of this off-site backup server. So I'll need to actually get the side panel off for one thing. And then that fan is plugged in there so I've got to be careful with it. So here we are, the off-site backup server. What's the point of this? Well, I've got my regular home server which backs up all my data and doesn't protect me in the event of theft or fire or whatever else that can happen. So I built myself a separate machine that can do nightly backups of all of my essentials. And I want my... So okay, so my home server will do a nightly backup and then it will do a nightly sync to this one. So the home server is about 20 terabytes and this one is only 8 by 1 terabyte running in RAID 5 with a hot spare off of this LSI 9240-4i RAID card. So this one's significantly smaller which means that I'm going to be only doing my essentials, you know, my family pictures and videos and stuff like that. The boot drive is of course, their Force GT 60 gig SSD. And then this ninth drive here is actually only for the purpose of backing up the boot drive, so backing up the actual OS. That's running Windows Home Server V2, so Windows Home Server 2011. And it's got a FENOM, or rather, FX 8140, so that's a lower power but still quite powerful 8-core chip, 2 gigs of RAM, just random video card and it's... I mean this was the only AMD motherboard I had lying around so it's got a Crosshair 4 formula in it. So I'm going to be throwing it under the desk here and I'll show you guys the software configuration shortly. So the software setup is actually fairly simple. There's just a few things you've got to do. So you've got to make sure that you set up your FTP server on the remote backup server. So I did a Nancy X Tech Tips episode about this. The one thing that I left out in that one is making sure that you set a static local IP for the server itself because otherwise every time you unplug or plug in an ethernet cable it can change and that's going to mess up all your settings. So you just set your FTP port, set all your user account settings. Yeah. Set up your router. Now this is something that's a little bit tricky so I've got all my Windows Home Server ports forwarded and then what I've discovered, and this is sort of weird, is that whenever I'm forwarding the FTP port, even though it's a single port, if I use the single port forwarding on my Linksys router it doesn't work. And then if I use port range forwarding and just put the one port in there then it does work and then this is my FTP transfer. So once that's all set up then what you've got to do is make sure you're testing it. So in this case I'm remote desktop, remote desktopping into my computer at home and then making sure that I can actually connect. You can see the FTP server is seeing the connection and I'm in and I can browse and so everything is working as it should. In fact here I'm just going to show you guys, you know, every time I do something here, both of those are active. So this is my computer at home that I'm remote desktopped into using Windows Home Server so now everything is set up for remote access to the FTP and what's left is to actually set up the nightly sync. Now that I'm back at home I can show you guys what I've got set up here. So for those of you who haven't seen it already that's my 3 by, or rather 8 by 3 terabyte storage server and this is the software that I'm using. So I'm going to show you guys a couple things. This is Web Drive. This is the magical $80 utility that makes this all happen. This is a heck of a lot better than paying for a monthly service because you set up the hardware for yourself once, you set this up and boom you've got your own personal cloud. Very cool stuff. So all you've got to do is add a Web Drive, map it to a drive letter. See this is the key because without being able to map, because FTP doesn't work exactly the same way as your local drive so you have to kind of trick the OS. So we have mapped using Web Drive this offsite backup server to the Z Drive. With that we can use free synchronization tools in order to do the nightly sync that don't involve any kind of like special software configuration. So we can just sync some folder to some other folder, no problem. Now you can do one time syncs with Free File Sync or you can actually set up batch ones. So let me just see if I, nope wrong one. See if I remember how to do this. I just did it last night. Yeah here we go. So you set up these batch ones and then you basically yeah, I don't know, yeah create batch file. There it is. Okay here we go, here we go, here we go. So you set it up, put your batch settings and all that and you save as and you create all these batch files. Now this is a very manual way to do it but I couldn't find anything more elegant. Sync toy didn't work. I did have trouble with sync toy deleting things that were gone from the left folder from the right folder no matter how I set up the relationship. So Free File Sync ended up being able to do that even over the FTP. So you set up all these things and then you go into the task scheduler in Windows, task scheduler, there it is Windows and you set up a nightly task of all of these, see there they are, of all of these things to run at a particular time every day. Now as long as you don't make huge wholesale changes in one day then it shouldn't be too hard on your internet connection but you should have a pretty decent upload. So I have a 5 megabit upload. I'm hoping to upgrade to a 15 megabit upload soon which will give me much, much faster nightly syncs and that's pretty much it in terms of the software setup. I mean I should show you guys what the navigation is like from the FTP. So this is an FTP. You'd never know it. Users, Linus, find some, I don't know, some video or something, videos, look there's a fly in the house. So you just, you can't play directly from there. It doesn't quite work that way. You can paste and then it downloads a file for you and because their internet connection is kind of not that fast you can see it's not coming down all that fast. It's a 960 meg file so I think you guys get the point but you can see that this behaves like a native Windows transfer which is what makes all of this sort of magically come together so thank you. Oh, okay, right, so security. Securing your connection is outside the scope of this video. So you guys will have to figure that part out on your own. There's FTP security. There's a variety of different things. What I've done is I've set a hard IP blacklist and then I've set a whitelist for just myself to that remote backup FTP so that doesn't secure me against everything because I'm not actually encrypting the data that I'm transferring right now but it does prevent people from just randomly logging into that backup FTP or the offsite FTP so thank you for checking out this episode of Linus Tech Tips and don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.