QuickThinking
New Around Here
I'm finally taking a comprehensive look at backup. My usual MO is something involving big external USB drives and the occasional hit or miss DVD backing up something critical. What I am working on now is building or buying and modding a feature rich NAS at home to get the type of backups and restore features I want. The moment I do that, I run into another concern, how do I backup my NAS?
Hardware RAID doesn't help me with fire, flood, tornado, or theft. I have a friend who built a NAS into a ventilated previously fire-proof safe bolted to the cement floor in his garage... I'm not going there!
I already posted some of my concerns in relation to an article Backing Up Your NAS: Harder Than It Should Be by Tim Higgins. You can find my post in the forums here.
Assuming I only put my music, personal photos, and videos on my home NAS that would still be over 100GBs of data. I need a way to make an off site copy of my NAS's data without breaking my ISP's EULA (which transfering 100GBs of data would surely do). Even if I was able to find a way around this by scheduling the job over weeks or months, what good would it do me when my NAS fails and I need to download same said data, none that's what.
So what I plan on doing. Build or buy and mod a second NAS / file server / freeNAS whatever and synchronize them locally. Then move the second device over to my friends house who has a high speed cable internet connection like mine and configure them so that any changes from that point on get mirrored over to the device at my friends house. To me, this seems like the only reasonably priced way to do an off site backup for personal use. A secondary feature, if I can get it, would be to encrypt my off site backup because who knows how curious my friend would turn out to be.
Anyways, considering I haven't built either device yet and I can do it right from the get go, what would you guys recommend? Take into account, I'm a highly technical Windows guy. I'm not scared of linux or tutorials but I am concerned that if the solution is too difficult to set up, then the likelihood of successfully restoring from a complicated solution goes way down and that defeats the purpose.
I'm considering everything from FreeNAS, BackupPC, rdiff-backup, identical commercial NASs modded to use rsync, over priced Drobos with Drobo Shares, etc.. it's all on the table. But I'd like the solution to come in at under 1k, and I should point out I have easy access to a few older PC's that could potentially be used as part of the solution.
There must be someone out there thats figured out a way to do a cost effective off site backup for personal use. Help a guy out!
Hardware RAID doesn't help me with fire, flood, tornado, or theft. I have a friend who built a NAS into a ventilated previously fire-proof safe bolted to the cement floor in his garage... I'm not going there!
I already posted some of my concerns in relation to an article Backing Up Your NAS: Harder Than It Should Be by Tim Higgins. You can find my post in the forums here.
Assuming I only put my music, personal photos, and videos on my home NAS that would still be over 100GBs of data. I need a way to make an off site copy of my NAS's data without breaking my ISP's EULA (which transfering 100GBs of data would surely do). Even if I was able to find a way around this by scheduling the job over weeks or months, what good would it do me when my NAS fails and I need to download same said data, none that's what.
So what I plan on doing. Build or buy and mod a second NAS / file server / freeNAS whatever and synchronize them locally. Then move the second device over to my friends house who has a high speed cable internet connection like mine and configure them so that any changes from that point on get mirrored over to the device at my friends house. To me, this seems like the only reasonably priced way to do an off site backup for personal use. A secondary feature, if I can get it, would be to encrypt my off site backup because who knows how curious my friend would turn out to be.
Anyways, considering I haven't built either device yet and I can do it right from the get go, what would you guys recommend? Take into account, I'm a highly technical Windows guy. I'm not scared of linux or tutorials but I am concerned that if the solution is too difficult to set up, then the likelihood of successfully restoring from a complicated solution goes way down and that defeats the purpose.
I'm considering everything from FreeNAS, BackupPC, rdiff-backup, identical commercial NASs modded to use rsync, over priced Drobos with Drobo Shares, etc.. it's all on the table. But I'd like the solution to come in at under 1k, and I should point out I have easy access to a few older PC's that could potentially be used as part of the solution.
There must be someone out there thats figured out a way to do a cost effective off site backup for personal use. Help a guy out!