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.

Comments

Covered before

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, this has been covered before, as it says. This 'article' reads like an advertisement. Are the editors taking money for this crap?

nice but

[mpost4]

your average joe end user probably not pay $400 for a back up system. And that is even if they average joe end user has even thought about backups.

BackupPC

[Aliencow]

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.

Re:BackupPC

[dstutz]

I run BackupPC on my linux server at home. I installed a separate harddrive and use it exclusively for this program. It's fairly easy to set up, works great, and the pooling+compression is wonderful because it saves so much space. Pooling means it doesn't back up more than 1 copy of the same file. It just links to that file in each backup (whether full or incremental).
# 2 full backups of total size 16.48GB (prior to pooling and compression),
# 6 incr backups of total size 1.29GB (prior to pooling and compression).
As you can see it thinks it has backed up over 17.5GB of data but on the main status page it says:
Pool is 6.98GB comprising 109320 files and 4369 directories (as of 1/2 01:00)
Pretty sweet program.

Re:No Offsite Built-in, etc.

[elf-fire]

All true, but I think you are comparing apple's and oranges. Aimed at the 'normal' user it will most likely backup people's letters, documents, bank-slips, holiday pictures and some home-video. Hardly anyone kept off-site backups of those when they were still on paper and magnetic-tape.

Re:The point...

[Tim C]

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...

Speaking like an average user...

[bigjnsa500]

What's a backup?

Re:Good but $400?

[gotpaint32]

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

Useless. Only backs up Win2K or WinXP.

[dpbsmith]

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.