Backup the right way.

Since my last post I have acquired a new box. Yes, quite literally a tiny Gigabyte Brix box for just £90. It needed a 4Gb RAM card and I opted to put a 1Tb WD hard drive into the slot available. This has Linux Mint 17 XFCE installed and is connected directly to the back of the home Sky Hub. Its basically the household Black box data recorder.
Each laptop in the house (wife’s, son’s, daughter’s and my own) has Deja Dup installed and configured to automatically log into the Black box via SSH every week and save a compressed, encrypted backup of all the data under the user’s Home directory. The login is itself automated by keeping the Blackbox’s IP and user account details in the Password manager application on each laptop (which all run Linux Mint 17).
No one now has to remember to ever backup; it just happens in the background every seven days.