Is Storage Capacity Outstriping Backup Capability?

Kzip asks: "On my modest home LAN we have four computers with around 300Gb of storage. A lot of this is used, but not a lot of it is backed up (certainly not on a regular basis). When I started looking for a backup solution I found that most of the affordable tape backup was way to small (DAT 12/24 is just too small now a days) or too slow (Onstream do 50Gb but on IDE it's only ~1MB/s ... so 6 tapes over 80+ hours!) or just too expensive (HP Ultrium is great, but at £3000 for a drive and £120 per tape it's a little pricey). So I'd like to ask the /. community: Does anyone know of a fast and affordable backup system for home/small office use." After a quick scan of Pricewatch and other sites, it seems that backup solutions >99G are expensive (all the ones I could find were more than $1000US). How long will it be before these and terabyte-backup solutions become affordable for SOHO ^? use?

Comments

Re:Reduce risk with a backup harddrive

[zoombah]

Let me expound upon what he is recommending.

By identifying yourself as a SOHO user, you have implicitly set your level of tolerance for backup failure. You just want safe recovery of your data in the event of a malfunctioning disk; you don't need to prevent against natural disasters, etc.

Dedicated backup hardware (i.e. tape drive arrays) costs too much - you already know that. Because you don't *require* all the securities offered by tape backup (i.e. the ability to dump data, store media in an offsite location, etc), the best backup solution would simply be a machine located on your existing network (yes, 100Mbit ethernet is fine) with enough hard disk space to hold your data. Remember, its your backup process that needs to be fault tolerant, not the backup machine itself.

So, if you have an extra Pentium or Pentium II lying around, equip it with an IDE Raid card and enough IDE disks to hold your data. I would suggest RAID 0 - well supported, fast, and inexpensive. Install your OS of choice (this is slashdot, so i guess its linux for you. My personal inclination would be a BSD, and in this case I would choose FreeBSD, simply because my experience with OpenBSD and IDE disks hasn't been great). On Day 0, completely synchronize the backup machine (i.e. cp -R /my/data/* /nfs/$BACKUP/$HOSTNAME). From there you can use rsync for daily backups. Hell, you could do them every half an hour, rsync is very fast for these sort of things.

In a word, yes....

[NetJunkie]

I've run in to the same problem. You can buy a 100GB drive for cheap, but good luck backing it up. The only real solution I've come up with is to just buy extra drives and mirror or RAID them.

I still think it's crazy to pay $140/tape for SDLT at the office....

Big Cheap Tape Drives

[psergiu]

... just follow the link in my .sig
I have one of those and it's plain cool.

300 Gig!?

[cr0sh]

And most of it is used!? What the hell do you have on those machines - a ton of MP3s and porn?

Seriously - I couldn't care less what you had, but you need to ask some serious questions here. You talk about four computers with 300 gig of storage, so that is around an 80 gig drive per machine. What you first need to do is consolidate and eliminate duplicate material - ie, build a fileserver, and eliminate redundant data.

How many of those MP3s are kept local on each machine, as copies, etc - when there should only be one copy? Same with those mpegs and jpegs, and any other kind of data.

When and where possible, drop as much of that data to CDs, and remove it off the hard drives - in fact, if I was in your position, I would build a machine with four of those 80 gig drives, then drop small 8 gig drives in each local machine. Partition that 8 gig drive into a 2 gig system partition a four gig application partition, and a 2 gig data partition. Give each user space as well on the fileserver. Put all the MP3s on the fileserver, and hook everyone and the fileserver up through a 100Mb switch. Also, each user can backup their data on their data partition to whatever medium suits them (to the fileserver, to a floppy, to a CD - whatever suits the amount of data they have), and forget the rest (in the event of a real problem, it can be reinstalled from the original disks, or from a backup on the fileserver).

You may also want to partition the fileserver, depending on the type of data being stored (or simply keep certain data on certain drives). Then, decide what is important, and what isn't (is an MP3 important - or is that 300 page dissertation important), and backup the important stuff to CD. Perhaps build a second machine to act as a "mirror" of some sort.

None of these suggestions should substitute for a real backup solution - so you can only do what you can with the money and stuff you have. But there is a way to keep most of what you have safe enough...