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Best Redundant Storage for Home Use?

Posted by Cliff on from the as-bits-replace-paper-and-tapes dept.

Brad Mace asks: "Despite my hard drive's dedicated service, I'm aware that it will someday fail. I'm not really interested in burning 100 CD-Rs to backup my hard drive, so I've been looking at RAID solutions. Obviously I don't need the best or the fastest stuff out there. What would be a reasonable setup for personal use? Have people had better experiences with internal raid arrays, external raid towers, or networked storage such as Snap servers? I'm primarily interested in low price and ease of use."

2 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. external drive at a friend's house by PapaZit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Right now, hard drives are the cheapest data storage medium bar none. Even an external USB or Firewire drive is cheaper per gig than tape/DVD/whatever for mortals once you factor in the cost of the drive (datacenters with terabytes of data are a different story).

    For most of us, we have a lot of data that we keep "just in case", and that collection grows pretty slowly. So, once you've made the initial backup, the incrementals are pretty small.

    There are three types of failure to worry about: drive failure, stupidity ("oops. I just deleted everything."), and major physical loss (theft, fire, etc.). Any second set of data on different media handles the first problem. An asynchronous second set of data (i.e. not RAID) handles the second problem. Off-site backups handle the third.

    So, for off-site backups, I made an initial backup locally with a Firewire drive, then I shipped it to a friend's house. He leaves it plugged in to his machine, mounted off of my home directory on his machine. I make nightly incrementals and send them off to his place. Every few weeks, I grab the drive, take it back to my place, and do a fresh full backup.

    If you have no friends (this is slashdot, after all), you could probably take the drive to work, so long as your boss doesn't object.

    --
    Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
  2. Re:Tape. by pfl · · Score: 3, Interesting
    It was not mentioned how much would need to be backed up, but I've used my Digital Video camera as a backup tape device for my important data. For me it's a very nice solution since now I use the same equipment for home videos and Gnomemeeting as well. Talk about a starving hacker/wife approved budget... :-)

    Good things with DV tapes are that they come with ~10GB of storage space and 3.5MB/s speed. Works very nicely with dvbackup

    Of course DV tapes are a non-standard solution, longer tapes do not exist yet and the solution does not scale - but hey, this is advice you find on slashdot.

    -pfl