Home/Small Office Data Storage

[b0redom]

HP Microserver + FreeNAS.

Very easy to setup, very cheap, and will take up to 5x3TB drives.

[Sysman]

Anyone considered Livedrive? It's a few quid a month and is basically a clone of your data held for 30 days so you've got that long to recover it.

I haven't looked at that but I have come across good reports of Tarsnap from those who have my respect on backup and security matters. It uses data de-duplication and is priced on what you use rather than what you think you might use.

Not for the Windows GUI fans though:

At the present time, Tarsnap does not support Windows (except via Cygwin) and does not have a graphical user interface.

[VectraMan]

I'm never buying Buffalo again.

A permie colleague has a Synology NAS which seems a pretty impressive piece of kit and with remote desktop, ability to run PHP applications etc. is really a mini low-power server rather than just storage.

[eek]

HP Microserver + FreeNAS.

Very easy to setup, very cheap, and will take up to 5x3TB drives.

HP Microserver + Unraid. I can't comment FreeNAS but I've successfully recovered 1.5tb of data when a disk failed on my unraid server.

[xoggoth]

You can get nearly 4 of these for that price:

1.5TB CORE External Desktop USB 2.0 Hard Drive Free Delivery : Other External Hard Drives : Maplin

I've got a smaller one. Great - just plug it in and it works. Use freeware Commodo backup. Occasionally freeware Fbackup4 as that is easier for backing up individual files rather than complete folders.

More than 1 device with rotating use should be safer from faults.

[PAH]

More than 1 device with rotating use should be safer from faults.

Most convenient way of doing offsite backups (to protect against fire, flood, theft). Have 2 or 3 on rotation, swapping weekly or whenever you visit a nearby relative.

With the cheap price of all the suitable options, a mixed strategy is best:

1. one or more NASes on site for immediate backup/access
2. one or more external drives for offsite backup

The online backup options may look tempting but even ignoring security concerns and ongoing charges, there's the small issue of getting your gigs of data into the 'cloud'. Most people will have a tulip upload speed, so could take weeks to transfer the data. Some companies send out external hard drives for the initial upload to get around the problem.

If you're downloading stuff, then re-uploading to online backup, it may be more efficient to use a VPS as the middleman, so you only download what you want offline and treat the VPS as a remote PC for all the larger files. Also gets around monthly bandwidth limits many home ISPs set.

[gingerjedi]

More than 1 device with rotating use should be safer from faults.

If its just backup then does it matter as long as the data is intact somewhere? You just need to get a new one and backup again.

If you have 4x HDD's the chances of one going wrong is higher than a single failure shirley?

That is at least how I justify it to myself when not wanting to spend money.

[Spacecadet]

If you have 4x HDD's the chances of one going wrong is higher than a single failure shirley?

But if that one device fails you still have your data on 3 other devices

[gingerjedi]

But if that one device fails you still have your data on 3 other devices

And then you have to replace the broken one, I can see the benefit for companies where the downtime might be a problem but for most people at home it's not really necessary IMO.

[Spacecadet]

And then you have to replace the broken one, I can see the benefit for companies where the downtime might be a problem but for most people at home it's not really necessary IMO.

I see where the purposes are crossed

I was looking for primary storage which has redundancy built in, not just a backup solution for PC/Laptop