I have had another (Seagate) drive fail on me and this has exposed a weakness in my file backup strategy. I have a home network of 3 PCs, one of which is used as a backup file server to the other 2. The server is running Win 8, the other 2 are Win 7.
The most volatile data I have on the PC with the dead disk is email client files (Windows Live Mail in this case). I use an on-demand backup tool (www.memeo.com) to backup locally and remotely to a server PC on the LAN, supplemented by monthly backups to my SKYDRIVE account using SYNCBACK. The problem is that with email client files Memeo detects file change and takes control of each file briefly to back it up. When an email message is pulled from the (POP) server the files involved are locked for backup briefly and any attempt to access the message gets an IO error. Therefore for Livemail files Memeo was not used to back up the files to the Server PC because file locks could last too long. Accordingly I now have just the monthly backup to restore these files as the only available files to restore from are on the server and Skydrive.
I could use Skydrive to protect these files but because the data is fairly volatile I can see my data cap being threatened. The Skydrive approach - but to my Server instead of the Cloud - would seem the best option though and would render Memeo redundant. Is this possible?