[TriLUG] Cheap Backup

[Joel Ebel]

Since he stated he has over 500 GB of mp3's, backing them all up to a 
single external USB drive would become difficult and expensive.  In 
fact, the only 500 GB drive I can find id the LaCie BigDisk external 
drive.  It's quite expensive ($374)  Since he already has 500 GB of 
mp3's, this may or may not even fit, and doesn't leave any room for 
expansion.  And he will still need to purchase enough drives to store 
500 GB on his server, which will require multiple disks since I don't 
see any internal 500 GB drives available. (What do they use inside the 
LaCie BigDisk??)  So he'll either need to buy 2 250 GB drive and the 
LaCie BigDisk and have no room for expansion, costing about $600 or 
purchase 4 200 GB drives and a PCI IDE adapter for about $375 total and 
have an extra 100 GB to expand into.

External USB drives are a convenient method of backups, but in this 
case, I think a good RAID 5 is much more cost effective and appropriate 
for the size of data.  Normally I would say that RAID is not a 
replacement for good backups, but in this case, the reasons needed for a 
backup instead of a RAID are lessened.  Accidental file deletion is 
probably unlikely in an mp3 archive, and the expense of protecting 
against that just isn't worth it.  Protecting against hardware failure 
should be the primary concern.  If in the future, a separate backup 
becomes a possibility both financially and physically (disks get big 
enough to hold your mp3's) then a backup scenario could be implemented 
as well.  But if you're on a budget, the cheapest way to prevent against 
hardware failure will be a single RAID 5 array.

Joel

jbrigman at nc.rr.com wrote:
>>The cheap backup I use is another disk in a usb/firewire
>>external case (from other postings they're at Intrex,
>>I got mine at DealSonic). I plug it in once a week and
>>sync everything. Sure disks are unreliable, but they're
>>cheap and at a hour or two a week, it's going to get too
>>small before it dies. When you want a new disk, just
>>pop the case open and replace the disk.
> 
> 
> I have to second Joe's comment about using an external USB 2.0 or 
> better disk drive for backups. Works like a champ, is fast, and if you 
> do it right, you've got an image of your source system you can boot 
> from. Whatever O/S you use is almost irrelevant, the convenience is 
> well worth it. Much less work to do if you ever have to restore.