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This may not be the cheapest solution, but it's what I'm planning to do...

• Everyone acquires a NAS device (Drobo, Synology, etc) of an appropriate capacity, ideally something that can handle several TB and is expandable.
• Fill up with 4TB drives.
• Install BitTorrent Sync, and share out a portion of the NAS.

You can install the client on your desktop, mobile, linux, and freebsd devices, too (you'll want a supported NAS, so something linux-based or FreeNAS or such, unfortunately nothing MIPS-based.

I'm primarily planning on just dropping something (probably a Drobo 5N) off at my mom's (she & my step-dad aren't tech savvy), and setting everything up for them, including backups of their PCs to the device, sharing of photos & videos, etc. And then setting up replication of critical, irreplaceable data between their place and mine. On my side, I already have a Synology DS1813+ that I need to set up, first.

The Synology stuff also has the capability to deal with IP Cameras for monitoring (though I suspect that if you just set up a share to dump images to, you won't need a license for it). For streaming, I believe both Drobo & Synology (as well as others) have media servers, so app-enabled TVs, BluRay players, and game consoles should be able to stream appropriate movies and music as needed.

I'm thinking the NAS, my laptop (which I'll also start backups to the NAS, likely NOT shared), my VPS, and my mobile devices (phone, tablet) will all sync, as will my wife's laptop & devices.

Yes, this is probably heavily overdone, but it also avoids putting private data on systems that I don't control, and avoids the commercial cloud providers at the same time. And, not surprisingly, I play a sysadmin for my day job, so this ties in nicely with that, too.

I have an FS, which I think is similar to the 5N.

http://www.drobo.com/products/professionals/drobo-5n/index.php

That initial cost is quite the leap of faith, but dually redundant mismatched drives that I can upgrade seamlessly at my leisure (and if drives ever get cheap again)? Done.

And yes, you could build your own network of rsync shares more cheaply, and performance is frankly unspectacular (may be my crusty 100M network.) But it's a ten minute setup for a virtually inexhaustible file share that you don't ever have to worry about. Sounds about right for our tech-wary OP.

Agreed. And in the spirit of K.I.S.S., I'd suggest you use external storage like a drobo. You can grow the disk as you see fit, no technical expertise needed. Just add/swap drives as you go. Braindead simple.

No, I don't work for them, but for simple self-maintaining medium sized storage they work pretty well. I've got 4 (3 at work, one at home), and the only problem I've had was when I put a bad WD drive in a unit and it fried the slot.

An 8 drive DroboPro with 3 TB disks might just about do it.

Check out:
http://www.drobo.com/products/professionals/drobo-pro/index.php

If you can afford it ($700, diskless) Drobo is easily the best storage small business storage solution out there.

For the SOHO market using cheap software-based RAID arrays, the non-TLER drives work just fine in RAID configurations.

Not WD Desktop drives

Intel managed to improve things on their end with modifications to the Intel Rapid Storage driver. AMD fake RAID (the kind managed with a browser based utility) however still has WD Desktop drives dropping out of mirror every 30 days or so. A full zeroing out of the drives along with a full diagnostic reports the drives perfectly fine. They still drop out. For a few AMD workstations I've built, I had to change my redundancy strategy. I intentionally broke the mirror volume and reclaimed one of the drives to be used as a target for Windows 7 backups. Problem solved. Neither drive has reported issues in well over six months now.

I am curious to know how Drobo devices handle desktop drives in this manor and why some versions handle different type of make/model of drives differently than other Drobo units. Check out their product matrix below. Most curious.

http://www.drobo.com/products/choose-drive.php

And one NAS shall bind them all. http://www.drobo.com/ If I could have afforded it I would have bought a drobo. I ended up with a Thecus (strange name) instead. Don't get me wrong it's a nice little unit but the documentation is horrible and the KB is not much better. Shoehornjob

How about Drobo or Cavalry, why not that with cron + rsync?

In your case, since it sounds like you don't create that much data, you'd probably be fine picking up a couple of portable USB drives (2.5" drive, powered over USB = tiny). For consumer use, the Samsung Goflex 1TB (the 2.5" version) is around $100, widely available, and works great in my experience. Buy two. Use one as your master repository, one as a backup of that, and keep the second in a water-proof container (hint: try rubbermaid containers, they're waterproof and cost about $4), locked in an inexpensive fire safe, safety deposit box, or at a nearby friend's or relative's house. If you aren't needing to store more than 64GB of material then you could substitute "thumb drive" or "CF/SD card and reader" for portable USB drive ... solid state media will be 'safer' for long-term storage but obviously afford less space-per-dollar.

A better option, but beyond what you wanted is a SAN/NAS. Drobo makes some decent products, and I currently have a DroboFS at my home, loaded with 2TB drives. This gives me a little over 7TB of RAID storage to backup all my footage, images, documents, and so forth. It's network addressable, so any of the several machines in my house (both Mac and Windows) can access it. The total cost (Drobo + drives) was around $1100 or $1200 iirc. The downside to the FS is that its max transfer speed is around 20MB/sec, but they do offer other models with transfer speeds that are better suited to live editing — I only use the FS for backup, I have 4TB [in the machine I am posting from now] dedicated to live editing. The Drobo is nice, imo, because it's a consumer-oriented appliance (with RAID built in) that can take any SATA drive, will allow you to mix and match drive capacities on the fly, and they offer 'Time Machine' style automated backups (along with other apps) if you want that sort of thing. Beyond the Drobo, I also do separate backups to portable drives and keep them offsite (as I mentioned above), just as an extra level of paranoia in case my house burns down. If you are really paranoid or into safety, LTO would be a better way to go for this.

Actually, given how little data you (the original poster) might need to backup, an old LTO machine bought on craigslist (LTO 1 will do 100GB, 2 does 200GB) might be the solution. The tapes are relatively cheap, and the format is both open and reverse-compatible for a few generations (so when your LTO 1 craigslist machine dies you can buy an LTO 2 or 3 machine from the same venue and still access your content (and then migrate it forward to LTO 2 or 3)).

In your case, since it sounds like you don't create that much data, you'd probably be fine picking up a couple of portable USB drives (2.5" drive, powered over USB = tiny). For consumer use, the Samsung Goflex 1TB (the 2.5" version) is around $100, widely available, and works great in my experience. Buy two. Use one as your master repository, one as a backup of that, and keep the second in a water-proof container (hint: try rubbermaid containers, they're waterproof and cost about $4), locked in an inexpensive fire safe, safety deposit box, or at a nearby friend's or relative's house. If you aren't needing to store more than 64GB of material then you could substitute "thumb drive" or "CF/SD card and reader" for portable USB drive ... solid state media will be 'safer' for long-term storage but obviously afford less space-per-dollar.

A better option, but beyond what you wanted is a SAN/NAS. Drobo makes some decent products, and I currently have a DroboFS at my home, loaded with 2TB drives. This gives me a little over 7TB of RAID storage to backup all my footage, images, documents, and so forth. It's network addressable, so any of the several machines in my house (both Mac and Windows) can access it. The total cost (Drobo + drives) was around $1100 or $1200 iirc. The downside to the FS is that its max transfer speed is around 20MB/sec, but they do offer other models with transfer speeds that are better suited to live editing — I only use the FS for backup, I have 4TB [in the machine I am posting from now] dedicated to live editing. The Drobo is nice, imo, because it's a consumer-oriented appliance (with RAID built in) that can take any SATA drive, will allow you to mix and match drive capacities on the fly, and they offer 'Time Machine' style automated backups (along with other apps) if you want that sort of thing. Beyond the Drobo, I also do separate backups to portable drives and keep them offsite (as I mentioned above), just as an extra level of paranoia in case my house burns down. If you are really paranoid or into safety, LTO would be a better way to go for this.

Actually, given how little data you (the original poster) might need to backup, an old LTO machine bought on craigslist (LTO 1 will do 100GB, 2 does 200GB) might be the solution. The tapes are relatively cheap, and the format is both open and reverse-compatible for a few generations (so when your LTO 1 craigslist machine dies you can buy an LTO 2 or 3 machine from the same venue and still access your content (and then migrate it forward to LTO 2 or 3)).

http://www.drobo.com/ Problem solved

Nativity is overrated. UNFS does a fine job.

Sounds like you need a Drobo (from http://www.drobo.com./ The various units are expensive, and you'll probably need the Drobo FS if I read your post correctly. The upshot is, though, it's expandable to 20 TB of space. Just shove a drive in.

(Note: Not a Drobo vendor, just a fan who wants one himself)

... you should totally check out Cali Lewis's promo video at http://drobo.com/resources/drobodemo.php She is soooooo cute. Plus I recommend the drobo as well with its cool "Beyond Raid" system that let's you just pull out the smallest disk in your array and plug in a new one. Anyone who's ever rebuild or updated a traditional RAID array knows what an improvement that is. Good Luck

You made no mention of a budget. I'd go with a Drobo - probably the DroboFS. http://www.drobo.com/products/drobo-fs.php

http://www.drobo.com/products/droboelite.php

Each Drobo has 8 bays of 2TB drives for a total of 16TB. And 255 Drobos can be linked together over Ethernet to create a single virtual volume of 4 Petabytes.

To back it all up, just buy more Drobos and store those in a separate location. They're too big for a safe deposit box, so your home is just as good as anywhere else (assuming your home is different than your office) -- or a temperature-controlled storage unit if you don't like that idea.

If you can afford it, I recommend the backup strategy I use, which involves four complete sets of the data. The main one is online. The second is always connected to the network and receives a backup nightly via xxcopy (yes, I manage a file server in Windows -- shoot me). The third is on-site but not connected to the network and gets rotated with the second weekly. The fourth is off-site and gets rotated to on-site quarterly.

If you're really wed to the idea of off-line archival storage, get these for each customer -- get two so you can have two sets of data in case one goes bad:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822154428

Yes, "RAID is not backup", in that you shouldn't simply RAID your primary drive and consider the backup problem solved, but backing up to a RAID array can be advantageous -- you do disk-to-disk backup (via any of a variety of methods), and monitor the health of the RAID array closely -- if any disk in the array goes south, replace it promptly and your backup stays consistent. And, if you keep a spare drive or two around, you can swap a drive out occasionally to take off-site (and let the array rebuild onto one of your spares).

Personally, I like the ReadyNAS Duo a lot more than the Drobo (hard to explain, I just trust their tech better, and the ReadyNAS is natively networked, rather than needing an afterthought add-on). Last I checked, Amazon will sell you an empty ReadyNAS Duo and a couple WD Green 1TB drives for ballpark $500. That said I haven't got a ReadyNAS yet (because money has so many uses these days); I'm using my second most favorite backup setup, a 500GB laptop drive in an external bus-powered FireWire enclosure. I'm using a MacAlly PHR-S250CC enclosure (which I'm very happy with), using a drive I already had, but for a complete setup, I'd probably go with one of Other World Computing's packages for about $150. This loses RAID (which I ultimately want very much to have, for reliability), and isn't networked (which would be good for backing up multiple machines, and ease of use), but the bus-powered drive is so damned easy to use that I actually do it every day (set the drive next to my laptop and plug one cable between them, Time Machine notices the drive and starts a backup, 5-10 minutes later it's done, and I unmount the drive, unplug the cable, and put it back on the shelf).

My primary machine is a Mac; I use Time Machine for daily backups, and use SuperDuper to clone my MBP's drive onto the same backup disk every few weeks (minus a number of large directories that I know Time Machine is getting anyway); this gives me a backup drive I can boot from (via SuperDuper), and a lot of incremental history stored in a very usable manner (via Time Machine). And a backup system that I actually use because it's painless.

Add a ReadyNAS, and I could have my laptop automatically backing (hourly) up any time it's on the home network.

As far as on-line backup goes, I haven't been convinced yet. It eats a lot of bandwidth, and it means that someone else (that I don't know personally) has a copy of all my data, with only their promise of encryption keeping them honest. Sure, there isn't much there for anyone else to get worked up about (a variety of legally purchased music and software, a bunch of old email and vacation photos), but if it's not out of my hands, then that's one less thing I have to worry about. I do love DropBox for moving non-confidential files around, but I wouldn't use it for backup.

I've been on the net too long. I saw "wardrobing" and parsed it as "war-drobing" and wondered how the war- prefix (a la "wardialing", ref. the sequential dialing program from WarGames) could possibly applied to data storage robots.

• Redundancy - You can lose one (or two) drives at one time without data loss
• Compatibility - Compatible with Win 2000/XP/2003/Vista, OS X 10.4 and later, and various flavors of linux
• Portability - You can pick the enclosure up and carry it to another computer
• Portability - If the controller dies, you can pop all your drives into a new Drobo and there will be no loss of data or need to rebuild the array
• Expandability - You can add new drives whenever you like, with no size, manufacturer, or model restrictions
• Ease of use - Initial setup and format of my Drobo took less than 20 minutes, the last 15 minutes of which were automated. When adding new drives, they will be automatically added to the array and available within 60 seconds, with no user interaction required

The one downside of a Drobo is vendor lock-in, if your controller dies. However, this seems to be the case with every RAID controller.

See the Drobos at the linked page. No eSATA, but perhaps you can get an eSATA -> firewire 800 or iSCSI (sp?) dongle. The best part about them is ease-of-use.

and the worst part is that their users all seem to be morons who don't realize they've been ripped off by slick marketing.

See the Drobos at the linked page. No eSATA, but perhaps you can get an eSATA -> firewire 800 or iSCSI (sp?) dongle. The best part about them is ease-of-use.

Perhaps a Drobo could be a good solution for you?

The biggest concern I'd have with single disks is that disk fail. Regularly.

I can see the point of wanting to store to disk - plenty of space, easy to use, and fast. But I'd really want some kind of redundancy. Have you thought about buying an external raid array? Possibly the easiest to use is the Drobo - just fill it with as many disks as you want, and it'll ensure your data is protected:

http://www.drobo.com/

They're more expensive than just buying disks (£300 empty), but that's well worth it if you'd like your data to still be accessible when you come back to use it.

I decided to go with the Drobo. It works as a JBOD raid, and you can mix and match disks and capacities. The drawback with the drobo is that it doesn't have a native networking capability. For that you need to buy a droboshare, or hook it up to a box & share it. And it has USB2, and 1394b, but not 1394a. So if you don't currently have firewire 800 capabilities, I recommend you get a card immediately if you choose to hook it up to a PC.

http://www.drobo.com/resources/drobocalculator.php

The NAS version of the Drobo is a little plugin box called Droboshare. It has a development SDK (recently released), and one of the first apps was, obviously, sshd. So now you can ssh into it and hack around as much as you want.

Why on earth can't they stick a gigabit ethernet port on it? That alone stops me buying it.

And no, the silly "spend an extra wadge of cash on this base thing to sit it on" is not a good solution.

Again, you can buy the next least expensive device that comes with a gigabit Ethernet port, the ReadyNAS NV+. It's only $1,000 compared to the USB Drobo + DroboShare which together costs $550, or $700 if you get the new FireWire Drobo. The DroboShare also runs Linux and will supposedly have the ability to run applications like BitTorrent soon. I think the "silly" DroboShare "base thing" is priced just about right for what it can do. It's basically a small file server that needs no configuration and costs only $199. I don't think you can find or create anything cheaper with comparable features. It's not just some dumb Ethernet card module that should cost $49.

Looks like the Drobo Apps just became available a few days ago. Thanks for reminding me to check! Christmas comes early this year!

Drobo Apps: http://www.drobo.com/droboapps/

we just became a reseller of the Drobo. There's a nice system. Perfect for people that don't want to learn anything. Just plug it in, and in about 5 minutes its set up and going. lets you know if there's a problem, turns on an idiot light, you feed it another drive, and forget about it.

This means I'm going to have to backup my drobo so I can reconfigure it from a maximum 4 TB enclosure to a maximum 6 TB enclosure (5.5 TiB actual). Good thing it isn't nearly full yet (and only has three 500 GB drives in it).

best of both worlds...

http://www.fitpc.com/ -- bog standard via based i386 compatible server, install any distro you want on it using an external optical drive. fanless, high tolerance to temperature variations, consumes 4 watts. Has 2 USB ports.

http://www.drobo.com/ -- usb box that isn't RAID. Just throw in a random collection of drives and it will give you the most capacity you can reasonably ask for with no configuration. dead simple.

I use a Drobo with DroboShare. The Drobo is USB connected and can be used with a single PC. DroboShare is an add-on that the Drobo plugs into to allow it to be connected over a 10/100/1000 Ethernet connection. Since it's USB based, the speed isn't spectacular, but it's fast enough on a Gigabit network to play two DVD images over the network simultaneously.

Drobo holds up to 4 SATA drives and has redundancy, but it's technically not RAID5. Rather than limiting the array size to a multiple of the smallest drive, you get an aggregate of the storage of all the drives minus the size of the largest disk for redundancy. For example, with RAID5, 2x250 GB drives + 2x500 GB drives gives you 750 GB of usable space (4x250 - 1x250 parity) with the 500 GB drives being pretty much wasted since you only get 250 GB out of each. With the Drobo you'd get 1 TB (2x250 + 2x500 - 1x500 parity). You can hot-swap dead drives or add higher capacity drives and it will automatically expand the available space while retaining existing files (unlike RAID5 implementations I've used).

I'm using a Drobo + DroboShare with 4x500 GB Western Digital GreenPower drives, which run absolutely silently and cool. I am completely happy with it. It looks very slick and has a capacity indicator and drive status lights.

Check it out at http://www.drobo.com/ Their Drobolator virtual Drobo shows how much space you'll get from any combination of drives (up to 2.7 TB). Please note I am in no way affiliated with Drobo other than being a very satisfied customer.

Drobo is Too Slow.

Their website says Up to 22MB/s. Really bad considering a single drive today can perform about twice as fast.

Source: http://www.drobo.com/products_drobo_specifications.html#products_nav

http://www.drobo.com/ Automatic RAID, hot-swappable and you can use any type/size/configuration of SATA drives. Upgrade as the price of drives go down. I've been using one for two months now and am very happy with it. I can watch a streaming movie while I yank out an 80GB to replace with a 500GB, and the movie doesn't even stutter once.

drobo and add to it the drobo share

drobo and add to it the drobo share

Check out Drobo, too.. it automatically moves data around if a drive fails. When a red light comes on, just pop another drive in: http://www.drobo.com/

Get a Drobo and use it as a backup disk.

Even better: get two and use one as primary storage and another as backup.

Data Robotics, Inc. makes a storage robot that's called Drobo. You can plug up to 4 SATA drives of varying size into it and then hook it up to a network with a Drobo Share base. http://www.drobo.com/

I think what you're looking for is something like the Drobo, but like me you would prefer it were a rack mountable 14+ drive enclosure. More like a cross between the Drobo and perhaps an Apple / Promise RAID unit.

Play around with the Drobo configurator on their website - it's interesting. Seems like four drives really don't open up the usefulness of their system. I'm sure the more drives there are the more effective it would be.

RAID-Z2 can survive two drive failures; three failures will kill the pool.

That's interesting, because the Linux implementations do not suffer these flaws. Look at the Drobo for a hardware device that implements exactly this, runtime.

That's a lot like the Drobo (http://www.drobo.com/) but it only holds 4 drives and connects via USB. A step in the right direction though.

Drobo does this. There's an LED gauge showing how full the array is, and when a drive needs replacing, the light next to it turns red. You can mix and match different sized drives, too - when it gets full, you can pop out a 250 GB and put in a 1 TB.

The downside is it only has 4 bays and connects via USB 2.

LaCie? LaCie's products are absolute CARP - we had four die in the last 6 months. Of course, they were all about a month out of warranty. I'd rather get a good barebones system with a good PSU, put in a good SATA RAID card (if the mobo doesn't provide similar capabilities), and a few good Seagate drives...

Although, for a prebuilt system, the DROBO http://www.drobo.com/ is sort of interesting..

Mr. Anonymous

http://www.drobo.com/ No need to do or look for anything else. Thats it!

It's not made clear on the site, but the reason you get such high fault tolerance is it uses ~50% of the capacity for redundancy. So insert 1TB of data, get 510GB of "protected storage". This may change depending on the number of drives installed, I'm not sure. See their data sheet pdf here: http://www.drobo.com/pdf/drobo_data_sheet.pdf

Understand that for the $500, it will hold NOTHING, because out of the box, it comes with no drives. Your limitation on space is in how many drives you install (up to 4) and what capacity drives you install. Using their Drobolator page, you can see how capacity is affected by the number of drives and capacities. For example, installing 4 1TB drives gives you 3TB of protected storage.

Without knowing what you've looked at, it's hard to give you an intelligent reply, but a friend of mine just bought a Drobo and loves it.

If you don't mind running it on OSX or Windows, you can get a Drobo. It handles building rebuilding and the arrays for you automatically, even with disks of different sizes. The only problem is that it requires an HFS+ or NTFS filesystem -- no ext2/3/4, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, etc.

Another possibly for local storage is a standard disk array and manage your own raid.

the drobo looks pretty cool. it has data redundancy (though not raid, something "better than raid" according to their site, and therefore proprietary), you can use any size drives, it's fully hot swappable and you really don't have to think about it much. it's very easy to upgrade to bigger disks too. it has some glaring downsides, like it's usb-2 only. i'd like to see NAS for GiGE and a firewire interface. also i've read on their forums about the loud fan, heat issues, etc. so i'm waiting for v2. but it's a cool idea and seems well architected.

http://www.drobo.com/ Looks interesting. /DM