SOHO Backup solution recommendation

Hi, I posted this other places as well, so let's see what kinda
reaction I get here.

My wife has a photography business out of the house and has been
bugging me about putting together a backup solution for her pictures.
She shoots mostly in RAW format so the amount of space I'm looking at
is in the 500G to 1T range. I'm finding some good deals on drives
(mostly IDE 7200 stuff), but I'm wondering what the best way to expose
the storage on the network. I was looking at the NetGear SC101
device, or just a storage adapter with USB external enclosures. I
could also use a PII 400 that I have sitting around and mount them as
Shares under XP or other if I load Linux on the system. Any
recommendations would be appreciated.


Thanks
Andy

wrote:

My wife has a photography business out of the house and has been
bugging me about putting together a backup solution for her pictures.
She shoots mostly in RAW format so the amount of space I'm looking at
is in the 500G to 1T range. I'm finding some good deals on drives
(mostly IDE 7200 stuff), but I'm wondering what the best way to expose
the storage on the network. I was looking at the NetGear SC101
device, or just a storage adapter with USB external enclosures. I
could also use a PII 400 that I have sitting around and mount them as
Shares under XP or other if I load Linux on the system. Any
recommendations would be appreciated.

What I currently do is to back up my wife's Windows system from my
Linux system. I use a package called rsnapshot for Linux which uses a
combination of rsync and hard links to give me relatively long-term
backups with a minimal amount of disk space. As long as the file
doesn't change, rsnapshot just creates another hard link to the backup
file. I use smbmount with the automounter to automatically mount the
Windows drive from my Linux system. As long as the Windows system is
physically turned on, the backups take care of themselves. To allow
for restores, I offer the backup volume back up via samba and my wife
can drag and drop the files she needs restored based on their backup
dates. My wife has absolutely no Linux expertise (but I do).

Your challenge is to make 500-1000GB available online but you can do
that these days with a pair of 300GB drives. A decent tower will give
you all you need.

.../Ed

Since this is a backup solution and of good size for a SOHO, I would highly recommend a RAID solution. RAID 10 works well, but
double the cost, RAID 5 is the most cost effective but has a write penalty. You may not care about the write penalty for this
application however since you would probably copying from the camera or from the storage card and they are a lot slower than any
penalty you would see on a RAID 5 array. Reads from a RAID 5 a array are nice and fast.

Linux has a fair software RAID solution right out of the box and that would spare you the expense of a RAID card, but you would
probably need to add an extra storage card to get enough disk drives on the system.

I would hate to you set all this up and then have a single drive failure and lose it all.

Dennis

wrote:
Hi, I posted this other places as well, so let's see what kinda
reaction I get here.

My wife has a photography business out of the house and has been
bugging me about putting together a backup solution for her pictures.
She shoots mostly in RAW format so the amount of space I'm looking at
is in the 500G to 1T range. I'm finding some good deals on drives
(mostly IDE 7200 stuff), but I'm wondering what the best way to expose
the storage on the network. I was looking at the NetGear SC101
device, or just a storage adapter with USB external enclosures. I
could also use a PII 400 that I have sitting around and mount them as
Shares under XP or other if I load Linux on the system. Any
recommendations would be appreciated.


Thanks
Andy

writes:
My wife has a photography business out of the house and has been
bugging me about putting together a backup solution for her pictures.
She shoots mostly in RAW format so the amount of space I'm looking at
is in the 500G to 1T range. I'm finding some good deals on drives
(mostly IDE 7200 stuff), but I'm wondering what the best way to expose
the storage on the network.

Ya know, I think you should consider spending a bit more cash and
getting an actual tape drive (LTO 1 or LTO 2). Media cost per GB is
cheaper than hard disks (though the drive costs more) and the tapes
are impervious to some types of electronic/mechanical failures that
hd's are subject to. Once a month or maybe more often, write out a
tape and mail it to a friend or associate in another state, in case
something happens at your location. See also:

http://www.taobackup.com

Actually you didn't really say if this is true Backup or Archive (some people get these confused). One
dangerous think is to think that something is on the backup device so they can reclaim space on the
main computer because their data is safe all backed up. Well if you do that, then it's not backed up anymore
it's just archived. Having a backup means having more than one copy.

wrote:
Hi, I posted this other places as well, so let's see what kinda
reaction I get here.

My wife has a photography business out of the house and has been
bugging me about putting together a backup solution for her pictures.
She shoots mostly in RAW format so the amount of space I'm looking at
is in the 500G to 1T range. I'm finding some good deals on drives
(mostly IDE 7200 stuff), but I'm wondering what the best way to expose
the storage on the network. I was looking at the NetGear SC101
device, or just a storage adapter with USB external enclosures. I
could also use a PII 400 that I have sitting around and mount them as
Shares under XP or other if I load Linux on the system. Any
recommendations would be appreciated.


Thanks
Andy