are any of you guys doing some fancy NAS backup thing on your home networks? got hardware or software you like for it? thinking about doing some of that myself.
23 April 2008
NAS at home?
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are any of you guys doing some fancy NAS backup thing on your home networks? got hardware or software you like for it? thinking about doing some of that myself.
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tormp
at
02:33
Labels: ask anchorbutt, NAS, some cultures find it delicious
Everything makes a little more sense when it's anchored.
10 comments:
I am, although it's technically not NAS. I have an old to-do to blog about how it all works, but it basically accomplishes what Apple's Time Machine does, without the fancy UI, and it backs up multiple machines. It's done using rsnapshot on NetBSD.
It's a little finicky and there are some gotchas to watch out for (I can help), but it works well once you get it set up. I have 7 daily snapshots and 3 additional weekly snapshots of about 75GB of data from 3 machines automatically backed up every day, and only using about 85GB of total disk space.
Found this free Cobian software for Windows that does a decent job.
those both look pretty solid. what are you using for storage? i was considering trying out a simple RAID configuration.
I used to have a Mini-ITX fileserver (NetBSD, Samba, etc.) with two drive bays and three drives. Two drives in a RAID1; after a week, shut down, pull a drive out (there's your new offline backup), put in the old backup and reconstruct the mirror onto it. Got it down to a pretty short procedure and documented what to do in a bunch of worrisome use cases like drive failure (I still have the doc somewhere). I'm older and less ambitious now, but this worked really well for me. I've always been interested in Nathan's setup, too.
Something that caught my eye recently is Flyback. But I have real Time Machine on most of the systems I care about.
that's really close to what i had in mind. just curious, why bother with the offline disk ritual if you've got a mirrored configuration like that?
looks like you can pick up some mini-itx boards on ebay for pretty cheap, esp. if you're just looking for something appropriate for backup and not to act as a media server. did you have it mounted in something, or just hanging out on the coffee table?
The mirroring was in case a disk goes stupid. The offline was in case I go stupid. I had a whole little machine, it was cute. The case was something a lot like this.
RAID is generally overkill for a backup solution. If you have a bunch of stuff backed up to a disk, and that disk dies, you still have the originals. You might lose the older backups, and so long as the backup drive is down you don't have a backup, but given how unlikely drive failure is, I don't worry about those things. (No harm in it, though.)
RAID is more intended to help with performance or recovery time (fast!).
Ah, but disks are cheap, whereas being insufficiently careful (as I so expensively learned) is expensive. In my experience, the risk of drive failure is actually quite high. It made me feel better to know I'd engineered a system wherein a single drive failure couldn't endanger my data or even knock my system offline; plus, when a disk inevitably went south, replacing it was the exact same RAID-reconstruction procedure I'd had plenty of practice with, so the chances of my making a mistake were pretty low.
I guess this is a long version of "I got burned, so I got real careful."
yeah, i'm of the same paranoid mentality, though i also was thinking about going the backup + media server route (despite my earlier proclamations to the contrary), hence the interest in RAID.
Ah, I actually posted the semi-finished document to my blog. Lucky (?) you: How to make backups using NetBSD's RAIDframe.
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