Re: The Future of Backing Up & Drobo-like Technologies

In <wyvern-214970.16471710012008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Madwen wrote:

That sounds even more expensive. Our Airport Extreme works so well for
us, I can't imagine returning to a wired network.

I already have a well wired house. When we moved in a couple years ago we had to have a lot of work done, so I hired an electrician to run CAT6 throughout the house with everything going to a closet (that had been a wet bar. My only problem is that there is no AC vents in this closet.

I do have wireless, because there was one room about which there was miscommunication with the electrician (I wasn't around to supervise the work) and now a couple mobile devices. It also look some weeks to get an actual connection to the house at all (long before the work was done or we really moved in) at which point my connection was through a wireless connection that seemed to come free in the neighborhood.

I've read too many bad things about software RAIDs to attempt that. Too
bad Superduper isn't Leopard compatible yet and Retrospect does not work
for Intel Macs. Time Machine just doesn't seem like a good solution for
a 3 computer network as yet.

I'm using TimeMachine for each of the three Macs (not counting the Macbook which I don't need to back up), but that doesn't really give me anything I can take and keep off-site. (And in the G5 PowerMac the TimeMachine disk is internal). For the other two there was a special at Fry's for Maxtor 450GB Firewire disks/enclosures.

But I still have two FreeBSD boxes. One is my external facing box on my DMZ. The other is a server for everything else on the internal network, but it's not doing file serving, though I have plans for it being a MySQL or Postgres server and also a web and chat proxy when my daughter gets old enough that I'll want to openly snoop on her activity.[1] Anyway, I've got these two servers. I've got a third very low powered box that I'll eventually make into a backup name and DHCP server, one I can do a PXE boot to actually install anything on it.

There is also my wife's XP laptop from work. I don't think that I'll bother backing that up, just as I see no need to back up my MacBook.

Eventually, I might add a NAS to this mix. Now that the High-def video format wars are coming to an end, I'll actually replace the TV with a high-def one. And so a NAS media server might be good idea. At the moment, my G5 Mac Pro has the iTunes library for the house, but it's not available to the TV or stereo system. Naturally the media will need back-up as well.

Again, I want to be able to take the back-up media off-site. If not a NAS would be a be sufficient for backup using something like bacula (which has good clients for lots of systems). The cost of the media for taking off-site is important. Tapes may still be better at the moment, but removable disks are looking to surpass them.

Finally, there is the option of at least keeping some of the data remotely using something like Amazon's S3 or other "cheap" off-site on-line storage. It wouldn't be cheap enough for the big stuff, but maybe daily differentials.

Anyway, that's my musing on this subject.

Cheers,

-j

PS: [1] I know that this is an issue that a lot of people have very strong opinions about it. At the moment my nine year old isn't into various Chat's or "community" sites where I have to worry about anyone trying to trick her into things. So her browsing is unrestricted. I played with Safari parental controls for a week, but found it just a pain in the ass. Anyway, while it is very likely that she will encounter things on the web that are "inappropriate" she'll be encountering inappropriate materials in other ways too. All part of growing up.

On the whole, I'm not going to try to stop her from reading or seeing anything she wants to see. My concern is two way communication with strangers pretending to be something other than what they are. So what I will do, with her full knowledge (though probably not consent) is log everything she does. It will set up the firewall to force all connections to go through a proxy box and will log her traffic. If she has individuals that she wants to communicate with privately, I will need to check out those individuals, and then I will enable exchange encrypted messages with them. So she will still be able to communicate privately with her friends.

I'm not fully happy with this, in that it is more snooping than I would like. That is, I'm only interested in the two way communication, so I would like her to feel free to visit and read websites free from me or my wife snooping. But with so many interactive sites that allow two way communication, I'm stuck.


--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
I rarely read top-posted, over-quoting or HTML postings.
http://improve-usenet.org/
.

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