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Review of the Mirra Home Backup System
Darth Fredd writes "Having trouble backing up,or just too lazy to take the time? Behold Mirra, a networked RAID 1 volume, backs up everything automagically over the network. Extreme Tech has a review. Mirra uses the insanely popular (and fun) Mini ITX form factor motherboard. Mirra is targeted at the "normal" home and desktop user." We've mentioned the Mirra before.
Yeah, this has been covered before, as it says. This 'article' reads like an advertisement. Are the editors taking money for this crap?
For people who have a Linux server around the house,
BackupPC is a pretty good solution that can fetch files to backup through Samba and Rsync ! Nice web based interface, too.
I have that exact case/mobo running OpenBSD 3.4 as my home firewall and it's much louder than you would think. The source of the noise is the power supply. Just as loud if not louder than the Enermax 330w on my Athlon system.
The only difference I can find is that I have a Via 933mhz compared to the 1ghz on the Mirra. I had to strip the mounting bracket off of the 3Com NIC I added and secure it w/ double sided tape since it just wouldn't fit otherwise.
Other than that, it's a pretty good investment for me ocnsidering it was $160 at Fry's sans memory and hard drive. Very reliable, doesn't take up much space. Just noisy. Maybe I could find another quieter power supply?
This guy is way out there
Um... SoftRaid.
So are you recommending to use software RAID as your primary/only backup method?
And if software RAID fails? People who know anything about RAID say that it should never be relied upon as a primary backup method. You're still going to have to backup somewhere to another media/hd.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Interesting. So you can get modded up for copying old posts?
For $400 bucks Maxtor offers a 300gb portable backup hard drive, and $200 for a 120gb version. The idea of a network file server backup is nice but probably missing the mark with its targeted consumers. I would imagine most lay people would rather just plug something into the USB port of their computers rather than messing around with networking and whatnot.
Maxtor One Touch
Nuclear war would really set back cable. - Ted Turner
What are you smoking?
Buy hardware RAID with an automatic rebuild. It's the only way to be sure.
The owls are not what they seem
It's not actually RAID 1, and in fact there's no RAID in the unit at all.
Is this an attempt because it synchs your data? I've seen RAID 1. I know RAID 1. And lemme tell ya, that ain't RAID 1.
Um....the Mirra uses the MiniITX form factor - which is very small and exactly what you describe.
Phooey. It says right here that
"You can remotely access your photos and files from any Internet-connected PC, including Macs. Currently only computers that run Windows 2000 or Windows XP are supported for Mirra Backup and Restore within your home network."
So, my wife's PC running Windows 98 and my PowerMac G4 running OS X 10.3.2 could read files that had been backed up from any other machines on our network... except... there aren't any.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Actually, they aren't required to offer the source code unless they've made changes to anything. It sounds to me like they're just using a small distribution, a web server, and some backup software. It looks to me like all they are charging for is hardware and bundling.
Short version: If I use the linux kernel in a commercial product, I don't need to offer the source to it unless I've changed the kernel to do something special that it didn't do before. And if I write a program that operates on top of the kernel, I do NOT need to release that.
... get one of these
For a lot less money and still have one-touch convienence, less electricity usage, and much quieter operation?
Pretty easy too; open a browser into your xdrive account and click/drag or use the file selection dialog after you hit the "Upload" button. There's a "high security" (ssl) option and they host it all in datacenters with redundant OC-192's and backup power generators, etc. Take a look at it at least - its a great way to send each other huge files, etc.
C|N>K
My thoughts exactly. The concept is nice, but there is no way you're going to get joe consumer or joe "tech-savvy" consumer to plop down $400 for a back-up that:
9 60 &loc=10995
1) Takes a glacial amount of time to run (first run is apparently horrendous, but even the incremental back-ups are supposedly laughably slow)
2) Can ONLY take software driven HD back-ups, and cannot serve as a file server/network drop (yeah, that's right, sucks doesn't it?)
I saw a more critical review of the product that discussed testing, etc.
I've been dealing with this now since I really need back-up for my FLAC collection, want it on my network, and need flexibility. You would think that this would be easy... but it seems like no one can figure out how to make a stripped down hard drive with a bare OS for $200.
However, of all the ones I've looked at I will say that the Tritton 120gb NAS hard drive come's REAAAAALLLy close. You can read about it here:
http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=10351
(their web site is apparently down)
-rt
it's the software that makes this box worth anything. it's web configurable, and a set and forget type device. also, you dont' have to setup a back up schedule, or render your machine useless while the back up happens. This thing monitors all the files on all the hard drives that it's told about, and backs up every file that gets changed as it changes, and saves up to 8 versions of those files to restore from. IMHO, it's really not a bad deal for casual user. I might get one, and set it up for my mom.
I don't know how any meta-information on files is handled with BeOS. Under OS X, connecting through Samba stores the meta-information in a hidden file in each directory.
What, me worry?
I agree. For people who want a free, open source solution which can make distributed off-site backups as large as you like with built-in encryption and error correction I recommend the Distributed Internet Backup System (DIBS).