Rob Collingridge

With Christmas been and gone, we find ourselves with many iPhones and iPods (3rd gen Touch) in our family. Time to tackle the thorny issue of backups and sharing of content and applications. Just what is the best way to acheive this?

The approach I’ve taken is to master all video, music and other data on one ‘family’ PC and for each person in the household to have their own Windows XP login and Apple iTunes account. This makes backup of the single machine easier.

Music

All of our music sits on the C:\ drive (in a folder called MP3), with a folder for each artist and sub-folders for albums, etc. Each person then adds folders as required to their own iTunes library and syncs only checked songs to their apple device. The main reason for this is that not everyone wants full visibility of all the music held on the disk drive as our tastes in music vary a lot!

Apps

Although we each have our own Apple iTunes account, I wanted to avoid everyone having to buy the same apps over and over again. The way to do this is for the primary person in the household to buy them (me!) and sync them with iTunes.

This generates a number of apps files in this folder:

My Documents\My Music\iTunes\Mobile Applications

You need to then copy the apps files you want to share to a folder on the machine that can be accessed by all, e.g.

C:\Temp

You then login as the other user on this machine (the one that also wants to have these apps).  Once in iTunes, you then need to enter the Library / Applications view and drag and drop these shared apps files into this iTunes space. You can then synchronise the device and these applications will be copied onto it.

As far as I can tell there is a limit on the number of devices and machines you can share these applications on to but, I don’t know what it is and I haven’t hit this limit yet.

Backups

Each user on this ‘family PC’ can run a back up script (which invokes a program called xxcopy) and this copies the contents of the ‘My Documents’ folder into a folder (\backups\familypc\<user>) on some Networked Attached Storage (NAS). The NAS device is a large disk drive in a case that supports an Ethernet interface and it has a fixed IP address on our local network.

The same approach is used for all the other PCs in our household, so that each one has the critical data backed up regularly to the network store. In addition to this, the NAS device is also archived to a large USB disk once a week.