Building a backup station

drak3

drak3

drak3

Associate
Joined
26 Jan 2006
Posts
1,502
Hello all,

I am a bit worried about my data lately and my dodgy current backup procedures so I decided to take a more "formal and automated approach".

I have some components sitting around (X2 Dual core skt 939 etc) which I can use for a NAS built. For a case I am thinking to get an antec 300 (any opinions on this?) I have many drives. IDE and SATA lying around and I will be connecting all of them in the NAS. Sizes range from 150GB to 500GB.

The question now is, do I just connect all the drives and set up some sort of automated backup program to Tarball everything up and store a copy on each of the drives every night or something?

The IMPORTANT data is around 50GB so it should fit np and has room to grow. The rest of the data I can distribute it across the drives (music video etc) and I don't mind what happens to it as I can restore them from other media.

I would appreciate the help of the more experienced people.

Thanks.
 
OK after some reading I will go with ZFS and Raid-Z. From what I read this is something like the overpriced Drobo but better. Can use disks of all sizes also and ZFS will take care of how to use it properly. Can sustain disk failures also and there are no hardware specific requirements unlike raid cards that need to be identical if you are going to revive the array.

I guess I got a lot of research to do, but I like the features.

I will start with Virtual Box and experiment a bit. Downloading OpenSolaris now :)
 
DIABLO said:
I've heard FreeNas is good for an operating system.
Click to expand...

I tried freenas on virtual box but ZFS is simply awsome to skip :)

I now have a test environment with ZFS. You can create what is called "storage pools" that consists of many disks and ZFS takes care of the rest in software. No raid cards, nothing. Pure software and offers more than RAID-5.

You just type 2 commands and voila. Can also add/remove disks and everything works even if a disk(s) fail while you are watching a movie. It is very interesting. I will continue testing and once I am convinced I know how to properly set it up I will start afresh on the actual build and implement it in hardware without the many random commands I issued to test things :p

From reading white papers about ZFS etc sun claims (and justifies) so many problems that exists with RAID and how ZFS is superior to it. For a start the ability to add/remove disks and not be dependent on raid card firmware etc does it for me definately!

From what I gather you can basically build one of those EXPENSIVE drobo things using ZFS and not be limited to 4 disks and USB connections.
 
Last edited:
You should get Windows Home Server.

Much simpler way of doing what you are trying to achieve. It will take any size hard disks, and automatically do the storing across them.

If you get a motherboard with at least 6 sata ports, then it is an ideal solution.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom