DELETED_3139

Is the nas intended as the sole backup? Raid 5 will only protect against hard drive failure, not against the sata controller dying and killing drives, or the psu doing likewise, or good old user error. I'm sure you know this, but feel compelled to quote "raid is not a backup" in case.

I've been using an amd 7750be as the basis for a two drive nas for months now, running ubuntu server. It's been tediously reliable, runs backups based on rsync at whatever intervals it's told to. Rsync is extremely capable. Samba is pretty reliable so a linux based system is a viable alternative to windows home server, if you run something like Debian on it you can expect it to run forever without any signs of crashing and never needing a reboot.

As a cost cutting exercise you could buy some 1.5tb drives, rip the current ones out of their enclosures and put them all into a tower. As far as the rest of the hardware goes a cheap dual core would be ideal, possibly look into teaming two gigabit connections from nas to the switch, so that simultaneous backups still run swiftly.
 
have you thought about windows home server as it would be able to back up all up, plus give them share storage, then set it up to back them up every night and your good to go, plus it is easy to use account it is for home use, tho the only limit i see is that it has a max of ten clients
 
SiD the Turtle said:
Yuh RAID is not backup. Spend the money on a good tape drive :D
Click to expand...
This is how the search feature got me to this thread. What is a good, affordable tape backup solution for home users? Everything I see is Enterprise and waaayyy out of my price range. I can't seem to find anything locally, and I didn't see any other threads about it (other than Enterprise).
 
Raist said:
This is how the search feature got me to this thread. What is a good, affordable tape backup solution for home users? Everything I see is Enterprise and waaayyy out of my price range. I can't seem to find anything locally, and I didn't see any other threads about it (other than Enterprise).
Click to expand...

Tape isn't suitable for home users. You need a server or external tape drive and larger tape drives cost hundreds.

I would suggest a single larger 2TB hard drive that you can back up to.

Phil
 
King Arthur said:
Tape isn't suitable for home users. You need a server or external tape drive and larger tape drives cost hundreds.

I would suggest a single larger 2TB hard drive that you can back up to.

Phil
Click to expand...
That's what I was afraid of. Seems like a complete waste of a drive, and even locked in a safe it is still subject to failure through shock or something. What happened to the good ol' Iomega tapes? :p

I see Iomega has a REV drive now with removable media, but low capacity and quite costly. Shame.

In the near future Blu-Ray prices will come down. That might be one way to go.
 
2nd hand tape?
used to have an old tape drive that I backed up onto. now I use cloud/hdd combo
 
So just for home backup? What about hosted backup service such as Mozy? The free service wouldn't do you but the paid for service ($5 per month) features unlimited storage. Of course the initial backup will take an age, but then daily backups of your changed files are usually much, much smaller.

Saved my bacon many times.
 
A handful of 2tb drives in a basic PC with a decent sata card running raid5

That'll do for "normal" backups, he'll still need to do an occasional backup to a 3rd location to be safe, but 2 copies for anything should be enough for personal use.
 
D D Danneh said:
Can I ask why tape drives are so expensive? I thought they were fairly cheap :o
Click to expand...
It used to be. Flexible magnetic media was fairly inexpensive to produce as particles just weren't very dense (comparably), and throughput was just using the fastest available (SCSI if you could afford it, IDE, or even parallel port connections). Now, however, backup solutions are cooking at a rate of up to one gigabyte per second with 15 petabytes stored annually.

Check this out:

http://www.sun.com/customers/storage/cern.xml
 
This sounds like a perfect use for Windows Home server - supports up to 10 Clients, so will service all of his machines. The inbuilt backup system will save a lot of space if the machines are running the same OS, and you have the option to duplicate any data that is critical across multiple drives. In terms of a simple solution it really doesn't get easier - just make sure you spend a little extra and get a mobo with the maximum possible SATA ports to avoid the the need for add in cards!

If he still needs more an off site solution as mentioned above would then guarantee any critical data that he can't afford to lose 'in the fire'.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom