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Data Storage For Home?
kuom asks: "Every couple of years, I face the same problem: running out of hard drive space. No matter how big of a hard drive I get, I seem to find ways to fill it up within a few months. The size of my hard drive grew from 2.5G to 13G, to 20G, to 40G, 80G, 120G, and most recently, 200G. Today, I have a combined hard drive space of 280G, but I again find that I only have about 2G of free space left. My collection of family photos, web site content, TV episode captures, music files, and my archive of ISO files for various operating systems, they just eat up my hard drive space so fast. I could get a 400G hard drive, but I figure maybe it's time to think about something long term, something like EtherDrive or StorageWare. But the price tags are definitely out of my range. Slashdot readers, what do you suggest for home data storage?"
(get the 'trial' from microsoft and find tweaknt to remove the timebomb, don't worry about activation it should no problem).
I suspect someone in Redmond might have a problem with this. Using Linux and Samba would be a much better idea, and easy to do with a distribution like Ubuntu, Mephis or Suse.
-- $G
Your solution is to move things off of a hard drive. Correct. But you don't need a long-term professional solution--especially not when there's a long-term (or, if you want to be anal, medium-term) archival technology already tasked for the home.
Spend $100 and get yourself a DVD burner. Don't just use it for backup, but actually move things that you don't reference all the time--ESPECIALLY those ISOs you almost certainly don't need live--off of the live storage. For things that are important / irreplacable, make several copies. Distribute them far and wide to friends and family if you want.
Replace "hard drive storage" with "space in my home", and you'll see that it's not a matter of getting enough space to store all your stuff, it's a matter of deciding what's important to you that needs to be kept.
Where it's electronic bits or physical items, some things are more important to you than others. Take a long hard look at what things you absolutely need, and toss the rest. Will your life be that must worse if you didn't have "______" within easy reach at any given moment? Probably not. And you'll feel better knowing that the things you do keep are the important ones.
And don't think of it as parting with things you'd rather have kept. Think of it as making room for more new stuff.
Good luck.
Tom
If you're cheap, you can get the cheapest new system you can find, rip out the cd drive to free up an ide channel, find a way to safely mount four 250gb drives in it (I'd recommend the 250gb seagate 7200.8 for longevity, but that's just me) to make a raid 5, install a floppy drive, and use the floppy drive to do a net install of debian. Then set up samba for windows file sharing. That 750gb of redundant raid 5 storage will set you back between $500 and $900, depending on if you already have a system in mind to use for the job. Or you can get a good server with a similar setup for around $1500 or $1800, depending on if it needs to be fast.
Or you can just delete the ISO's and TV episodes, if they're not worth the extra cost and you're never going to use/watch them again anyway.
Whatever drives you get, make sure you research their quality first, especially if you don't care for the extra cost of a redundant raid and/or backups.
Re-evaluate what's on your storage. You sound like me - a bit of a hoarder.
Firstly, get a good catalogue system going. Put all your crap in one area. Get a sorted listing of creation time,last access time and categories. Get some hard-and-fast rules going as to when it should be archived offline. Go through once a month (or more often) and work out any new stuff that you need to backup. You do backup, don't you? Of course you do.
Then go through and check the last access times of your categories, and move to offline storage as appropriate.The advantage of getting this sort of regime going is that you've got more chance of having a backup offline somewhere when the inevitable happens and your drive wakes up dead one day.
For example, once you've got categories and last access times sorted:
- Digital Photos, family movies , documents - anything more than 12 months - Offline to DVD. Use par2 for archive copies (sent to distant relatives for storage), but make another set without par2 for normal, semi-random access.
- ISO's of distros? Got a broadband connection? Ditch them.
No broadband? Get them all offline, regardless of age.
- TV Episodes? If it's later than say, 3 months - off to DVD they go.
- Web Site content? 3 months.
And so on. Work the times out for yourself.
You really need a good cataloging system to help find out where the offline files are. Everyone's idea of a good catalog is different - Hell, I just label DVD's and keep them sorted by catagory - so I'll leave it to you.
If you organise your data and find that you still haven't enough drive space to keep all your current data online, then (and only then) go and look at the expensive options.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Take a long hard look at what things you absolutely need, and toss the rest.
Not me. For two reasons. First, I've too often found myself wishing I had something that I had deleted and second, it is simply not worth my time to wade through it all and decide what I need and what I don't. Disk space costs well under 50 cents per gigabyte, and even after you add some redundancy (RAID), it's still very cheap.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
RAID5 will fuck you if you depend on it to be your only failsafe on your data.
:)
Repeated again:
RAID5 will fuck you if you depend on it to be your ONLY failsafe on your data.
Your motherboard/controller could screw you. You could delete some files. 2 drives can fail at the same time (power surge,etc.)
There's just no excuse for not backing things up. I personally have a DDS3 tape drive in my file server for once yearly backups. Every 6 months I do a set of rewritables (DVD+RW). Every year or so I make a permanent copy on DVD+ or -R, and I buy decent burnables for that.
I've had instances where controllers, cables, and my own screw ups have lost data. But the cost to my time is minimal since I have backups in place. The way I figure it, the time I spend safeguarding my data is worth its weight in gold WHEN I have to depend on the backup for critical data.
Besides, Corporations back up their data - why can't we?
Karnal
1TB ought to be enough for anybody.
... remember that whole 640K thing.
Now, Bill
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.