Backup Laptop on Windows Home Server

At home, I have a WHS that is used (among others things) to backup computers.

However, I have an issue regarding laptop backups. How do you schedule these? The 3am schedule doesn't work, as the laptop is not waking up at night to backup, and as it is used on wifi, the backup is slow.

So, how do you manage this at home? Do you plug your laptop to the home network at night so it get backed up during the night, so it has to run all night long (and you have to plug in the power cable)?

Answer

You don't say what OS your laptop is running, but here's a couple of suggestions...

• If your laptop is not waking up, check in the advanced power settings to make sure that wake timers are enabled.


• Leave your laptop plugged into the power supply (but you can leave it sleeping). The reason is that (at least as far as Windows 7 is concerned), if the power supply is plugged in, the WiFi adapter will run at maximum performance.

You can leave the "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" checked for the WiFi card. Because this is a WiFi card, actually, you should find that the "Allow this device to bring the computer out of standby" is always grayed out.

The reason is that the "Wake-on LAN" function only applies to wired connections, not to WiFi adaptors. It's a Wake Timer (set by the Windows Home Server Connector Software on your laptop) that's triggering the start of the WHS backup, not activity on the LAN, which is why you have to have the Wake Timers enabled.

The comment in Molly's answer about "choosing incremental backup only" is irrelevant for WHS.