I had this idea when I dropped my laptop on the day of production rehearsals for a rock band I write visuals software for. I'd made a manual backup the day before, but I lost a crucial 4 hours worth of work, and had to scrabble around for a while before I could rewrite the stuff I'd lost. Not good.

The idea is for a 'backup brick' - a strong case containing a shock-mounted hard drive and wireless base station. You install a bit of software on the laptop you want to protect, and it then silently sends backup change info (i.e. when you change a file, it sends only the changes) to the backup drive, which then effectively mirrors your laptop drive.

If your laptop dies or is stolen, you just get hold of a replacement laptop, take the drive out of the backup brick and slot it into the new laptop.

As a bonus, the brick would upload changes to a web-based backup store whenever it could find an internet connection.
-- bumhat, Dec 27 2005

Sounds like a a WiFi SAN. Which sounds like a good idea, if it hasn't been baked already.
-- DrCurry, Dec 28 2005


If you were backing up over a wireless network (encrypted, of course), you wouldn't need to carry the brick around.
-- DrCurry, Dec 28 2005


I have a Wifi SAN at my home. Works good. Never thought about putting it in a portable case, though.
-- humanbean, Dec 30 2005


Could the case be red masonry, just so it makes a wee bit of sense to me?
-- moPuddin, Dec 30 2005


No.
-- bristolz, Dec 30 2005


Iomega makes a network hard drive that does the same thing with a program called folder share. Though downloading the lost info would take too long. Like the brick idea. bun
-- Ponies for Parties, Dec 30 2005


Don't know very much about SANs (apart from reading the wikipedia entry) but this seems a little different since we're mirroring a local drive wirelessly. Maybe it's more like RAID-1 over wifi ?

A single brick could provide backup for multiple laptops, i.e. useful for a small, temporary or moving office.

A mod to the laptop backup software could send change info to the network store whenever the backup brick wasn't found, i.e. you could leave the brick behind when taking your laptop on short excursions.

The idea really is to make backup work by making it pervasive and automatic, and therefore immediate / effortless to restore.
-- bumhat, Dec 30 2005


It could have a car battery underneath too, so you could run it if you loose your power supply/cable too.
-- Dub, Dec 30 2005



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