The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/vghgvbh on 2024-12-11 14:09:34.

First of all: Thank You for all your help in advance!

I work voluntarily for a non-profit youth-club in my neighborhood.

At the beginning of next year, I will be taking on the role of chairman for our organization and wanted to address the procurement of new PCs for our association, funded through donations we have received.

One of the items on my to-do list for next year was to purchase 20 lifetime licenses of Macrium Reflect Workstation. The plan was to implement a scheduled weekly incremental backup of each PC locally and then automatically sync it to the local NAS via Syncthing.

However, my plan has now been destroyed as Macrium switched to subscription base only and is demanding over €1,000 annually for our setup year after year. Which we cannot afford.

So. What can we use now, for our use-case?

I always favored Macrium until now, because I made good personal experiences with it at home, and it always worked flawlessly for me.

Please note that we do not have a network administrator or similar expertise available, nor can we afford one. Our team consists of volunteers with some technical background, and our hardware setup is relatively simple: a basic NAS, twenty PCs and laptops, and some peripheral devices.

This context makes it even more important for us to find a straightforward and user-friendly solution that can be managed with the resources and skills we have at hand.