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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.
Good idea. But it is missing WebDAV.
WebDAV can make it very easy to put and retrieve files from the server, using a web browser (over port 80).
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
It's also for those of us who do have the technical expertise, but frankly have better things to do with their free time than build something if a perfectly acceptable off-the-shelf product exists.
That said, whilst reading the article, I was mulling over how to go about building one myself, and what chance I'd have of convincing my girlfriend that while yes, we do have 3 PCs between 3 of us, another one *would* be a good idea...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Its a fairly cheap mini-itx, though (if its based on the newer boards). I'd be tempted to buy one and turn it into a Myth frontend.
My friend uses it a lot on his network, because his girlfriend uses a laptop for school and the HD dying on that thing would basically be the end of the world...or worse. He fetches the stuff from the laptop using the SMB protocol, and it downloads only new files/modified files.
This looks like decent, but I keep seeing the missing link in projects like these is the assumption that you are already running, or have time to install, *nix on the box you want to use for this. If you have a spare box sitting in a corner, it would be much more tempting to use it as an 'appliance' with software like this, if it came bundled with its own mini-distribution: upgrade the harddrive and then just pop in the CD and boot it up like you do with Knoppix or floppy distributions.
Building a Knoppix clone with this running would be quite interesting indeed.. Especially if you could replace the web-based interface with a GUI that starts up as soon as you login, then you could select the partition you want to backup to, where you want to save your settings..
This device sounds cool, and I've no doubt its easy to use.
However, as others have pointed out, it might be doomed to failure. Based on my observations, people who really do back up their data already have an easy solutions such as optical media, and simple copying between two networked machines.
The people who should buy one of these little boxes are the ones who constantly ignore any and all simple advice about how to ensure their documents, etc don't get hosed (I'm sure everyone here as a story to tell about people like that).
After all, the act of backing up in a home/home office situation is really just a bunch of copy/paste keystrokes, but in my experience getting people to do this is like pulling teeth. I recently had an encounter with a certain family member who was telling me how important his data was, etc etc. I suggested an easy solution for backups, and even offered to add a second hard drive to his PC so he could occasionally ghost the entire hard drive. Despite my continued offers, all I got was "yeah, we shoiuld do that some day, but not yet" Of course, down the road when the hard drive inevitably fails, I'll be asked to become a data forensics guy on 10 minutes notice. Grrrrrrr.