Simple redundant storage?

K

Kaldskryke

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 1, 2004
Messages
1,346
Hey,

I recently had a hardware problem, and for a moment I thought my hard drive had died. Fortunately, that was not the case and the hard drive is fine. Yet the experience reminded me how foolish I am for not doing regular backups or anything.

I've got about 400GB of data that I'd like to protect from drive failure, but I'm not sure what the easiest way to do so is. I frequently add to this data pool so I'd really rather not try to use scheduled backup software unless it can do things incrementally and automatically.

A friend of mine has a Drobo and it seems like a pretty easy solution, but I'm not sure how good the performance will be if it's limited to USB2.0.

Also, at $600, I wonder if it wouldn't be too much more expensive to build a simple file server but I'm not sure how to go about doing that. Just looking around this forum I see that WHS is very popular but I'm not sure what it offers to me that a Drobo wouldn't.

Am I missing an obvious and easy solution?

Thanks!
 
$600 you could get a basic file server. The drobo is really slow, so i wouldn't recommend it and its not great on backup ability in a drive failure. I'd just get a raid 1 or 5 nas or setup a raid 1 array internally in your computer (Two 1TB drives for $200 should work, basic raid card if your mobo doesn't do one).
 
For $600, WHS may be an appealing solution for you. Scrap together a simple file server with leftover or cheap, spare parts and use the rest on whatever you need to get it functional and purchase the software. Then you have a scalable, redundant, and simple file server for what you want.
 
$600 buys you alot of online storage space using Amazon's S3 safe secure backup, the intial backup will take awhile but the incremental backups thereafter shouldnt' be bad.
 
If you have 600 bucks to spend I'd just buy one of the hp windows home servers, 2 gigs of memory(I've read they run better with extra memory), and some extra drives for it. Gives you a nice little box designed to do what you need it to.
 
swatbat said:
If you have 600 bucks to spend I'd just buy one of the hp windows home servers, 2 gigs of memory(I've read they run better with extra memory), and some extra drives for it. Gives you a nice little box designed to do what you need it to.
Click to expand...

+1, Thats the best setup and its pretty cheap. Unless you already have a old box to use with whs.
 
For simple backups, I would recommend getting 2 X 1 TB external usb or Esata (if your comp supports it) drives and alternate them every week or 2 for your backups.

The reason you should alternate your backups is a common time to find corupted data is during a backup. If you are currently overwriting your only good backup at the time you find the problem, you are sorta outa luck.

A stand alone server is a bit overkill for simple backups.

Don
 
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