Affordable Home Backups for 10-100G Systems?

MichaelJames asks: "Ok, I have my MP3's streaming, all our digital pictures up, and a file server running on one machine in the basement. What would be the best way to do simple backups of the system and data? Get a tape drive Get a CDRW or DVDRW to backup the MP3 and pics, but use the old Zip drive for the file server data?" With drives in the 10-20 gig range only getting smaller and less expensive, what are we to do for backups, that have yet to scale well in the same range. For home systems with up to 100G of storage, what do you use to back up that much data, with a solution that's affordable to the average computer user? Have DVD writers become cheap enough for serious consideration as a backup media?

Comments

Tapes are still the way to go

[still cynical]

CD-R/CD-RW are too slow and too small, plan on spending a day or so swapping disks. You can always mirror to another hard drive, get a basic RAID card or just use a Ghost-like program to do manual backups. But tape is still cheaper per megabyte and more reliable. Sure, you can damage a tape, but it's harder to do than with a hard drive. SCSI tape drives are more expensive than another drive, but fast enough, and allow you to keep multiple versions or copies of your backup. Try that with hard drives and you need arrays. Tape starts looking REAL cheap then.

802.11 solution

[swordboy]

I'm sharing my cable modem via 802.11 with all the neighbors and since I am the local "neighborhood helpdesk technician", they often come to me for advice. Recently, one of them wanted to know how to go about backing things up properly. It dawned on me that hard drive space is abundant and most people are buying much more than they need (the person in question has an 80 gig at about 20% capacity). So I worked out a deal so that everyone is backing up to each other's PC at night on a weekly basis. The 802.11b connection keeps drive thrashing to a minimum yet provides enough speed for complete backup on an overnight basis.

I should start charging for these ideas... Can't wait for the proliferation of freenet!

How I back up a File server of 320 Gigabytes

[AgTiger]

I'm classifiable as an audio addict, having taken my entire personal
collection of CD's and ripped them to MP3's at 320 bit, and wanted to
have them stored in a central place, accessible from any machine in my
home. Currently this collection is at approximately 620 full CD's of
music, and I'm pushing right at, or just above the 80 gigabyte limit.

Now when you factor in personal files, financial records, games,
downloaded material, installation software you don't want to lose,
etc...etc... Well, see for yourself. Here's my space breakdown for the
partitions on my main file server Fumus (Smoke, in Latin):

fumus:/pub/mp3 # df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 3.0G 2.1G 804M 72% /
/dev/hda1 129M 6.8M 115M 6% /boot
/dev/hda5 9.8G 1.8M 9.3G 1% /home
/dev/hda6 20G 13G 6.3G 67% /pchome
/dev/hda8 40G 22G 17G 57% /pub
/dev/hdb1 75G 38G 33G 53% /pub/mp3
/dev/hda7 1.9G 20k 1.8G 1% /scratch
/dev/hdc1 74G 34G 40G 46% /pub/mp3_2
/dev/hdd1 74G 36G 37G 49% /pub/software

So, here's what I looked at:

Tape: For the size I'd need: Way WAY too expensive. When I brought
the media down into the range I'd afford, I'd be swapping tapes all week
to get a backup done. Not time effective.

CD-R: Faster, yes, but at 650 megabytes per media, same problem as
tape, only you've traded magne tic for optical.

Extra hard drives in the same machine: Originally, this is exactly what
I had done with a single file server running Reiser file systems in the
more experimental days. I got the scare (and lesson) of my life when
Reiser went a bit nuts, and started corrupting some of my data. I only
lost about one percent, but I vowed, never never NEVER again would I
backup data on a critical machine on live media in the same machine.

Okay, so here's what I finally DID select as my solution: A second
machine called Ignis (Fire in Latin) that uses the absolutely identical
configuration, right down to the types and number of drives, partition
sizes, everything. They both connect into my 100Mb network switch, and
Ignis rsync's from Fumus every hour on the hour thanks to scripts in
/etc/cron.hourly

In fact, here's Ignis' /etc/cron.hourly/rsync_with_fumus script:

rsync -arul --one-file-system --quiet fumus:/pub/mp3_2 /pub
rsync -arul --one-file-system --quiet fumus:/pub/mp3 /pub
rsync -azrul --one-file-system --quiet --delete --force fumus:/pub/software /pub
rsync -azrul --one-file-system --quiet --delete --force fumus:/pub /
rsync -azrul --one-file-system --quiet --delete --force fumus:/pchome /

Is this a bit extreme? Yes. But... if, gods forbid, Fumus really does
let out its magic smoke, or Ignis does catch on fire, and the physical
media were actually damaged, hopefully the damage would be limited to
*one* case, and wouldn't end up taking both machines out. Then I really
would be crying the blues.

Oh yes, and each machine is on their own 900VA UPS. I'm not playing
THAT game. :-)