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Is Storage Capacity Outstriping Backup Capability?

Posted by Cliff on from the terabyte-backup-solutions-anyone dept.

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?

2 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Reduce risk with a backup harddrive by zoombah · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. In a word, yes.... by NetJunkie · · Score: 5, Informative

    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....