Re: home backup

Bitstring <MPG.204bde834b65fefc989682@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, from the wonderful person jas0n <no@xxxxxxxxx> said
Its time I put together a home backup solution.

Kept data approx 100gb to start, room for upto 500gb for starters.

Im thinking of:-

NAS solution with a 2 drive raid 1 network box, sync all backup files to
it, any recommendations?

or get a raid 1 card with 2 large sata drives and put it into a pc to
act as server, already have the pc spare - pci, not pci-e.

These are more near line storage than backup but the data's not
important enough for large capacity removable storage and if we deem any
important for this we can always put it to dvd or maybe some sort of
online offsite storage.

Any recommendations?

Step1 - decide what eventuality you are backing up against. If it's just disk failure, then you could just backup each PC (the critical bits thereof) to another one on the network. If you are worried about theft, fire, lightning strikes, whatever, then your proposed solution doesn't necessarily protect you, as you've noticed.

Afaik (last time I looked) the two main causes of data loss on home PCs are a) disk failure, b) finger/brain trouble (accidental deletion or corruption).. A good archive policy (keep a copy of everything that gets deleted or overwritten) can help with b).

There is not much point using raid1 for backups (some point in using it for live data). By which I mean if you have a copy of the data on the PC you are using, and another copy on a separate PC elsewhere on the network, neither needs be RAID1, unless you are frantically worried about 'not even an hours outage'. And RAID1 comes with the problems of RAID cards, keeping the mirror volumes synched, and deciding which to believe if they differ. If the raid card itself, or the PC it is in dies, then you've lost both sets anyway.

fwiw, as you also noticed, most home users don't have even 1gb of critical data (Which I define as stuff they entered/created themself, which they can't redownload a copy of from where they first got it). 1gb is an awful lot of typing (and even quite a bit of .jpg).

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