[ale] Low-end tapedrives for SOHO environment

[James P. Kinney III]

My $0.02

Tapes are cheap, slow, and very reliable if rotated properly.

The removable HD is a great scenario for the SOHO crowd.

It is possible to install rsync onto a windows machine (use cygwin) and
then the back up of windows stuff gets _real_ easy (rsync the change
files over and drop them onto what ever storage you want)

The removable HD can be a USB mounted laptop drive. They are a bit more
rugged on the movement aspect than desktop drives. But they are slower.

A really low cost, rugged solution is the following:

Old PC with 4 drives, one small for the OS, the other 3 are newer, large
drives for the backup. One removable drive slot and 2 caddies. One large
drive is permanently mounted while the other 2 are rotated. The
permanent and the removable are in a software RAID 1 (mirror) setup. Put
the OS drive and the permanent drive on IDE0 and the removable and the
CD on IDE1. 

Now there is a way to make the backups (rsync or even scripted samba
mount) to the drive array. One copy local for restores, one copy for
off-site. Use separate directories for each machine.

If a caddied HD fails, no problem, there is a mirror. Unmount the array,
stop the MD devices, replace the HD, restart the array and the mirror
will heal. This will allow backups even if the removable drive is not
on-site at the time. When it gets installed later, it will get caught
up.

Old machine, $200 (includes CD and OS drive), 3 120G HD $400, drive
caddies $40, piece of mind $priceless.

On Fri, 2004-03-19 at 16:00, griffisb at bellsouth.net wrote:
> > > I didn't want to hijack the Bacula thread, but did want to discuss various Options for tape backups for the small office/home office environment. 
> 
> > Anyway, as another poster pointed out, an extra HD or two is probably
> > the cheapest solution. Cheap tapes will never keep up with HD
> > capacity, so you'll never be able to do a complete system backup on
> > tape, barring some fundamental technology innovation.
> > 
> 
> Okay - I think I'm sold on the disk drive. Would you make a Samba Server to back all the Win PC's up to, then use the external drive to backup the Samba Server - or would you completely skip the server, and just walk from PC to PC? If you walk PC to PC, would you make a separate partition for each PC? Or just one big partition.
> 
> I'm leaning towards a Samba Server, then just back that one up. Less walking around. But, I (or my son) would have to touch each PC anyway. The idea is to run a scandisk, delete old files, run windows update, update and run the anti-vir, then back the PC up. Once a month defrags would be done. Hmmmm, VNC on each desktop would certainly help ease that pain.
> 
> Sorry to talk about brandX operating system, but that is what is on the desktops. If I were to introduce Linux, it would be in the form of a file server / backup server. 
> 
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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