[TriLUG] Cheap Backup

[Joel Ebel]

One other alternative is to find a friend who has space and likes music. 
  He can mirror a copy of your collection and have the benefit of being 
able to listen to anything in it whenever he wants.  Of course this may 
be difficult, since there aren't too many people with 500 GB of space 
lying around, and probably even fewer that will have similar tastes in 
music to you.  But with 500 GB, you probably have a wide variety of 
tastes.  Then you could just split them up by genres, and find a friend 
who likes each one, letting them each mirror just that portion of the 
collection.  If you have some music no one else likes, you can either 
delete it because it sucks, or you can use the external drive method 
since you shouldn't have too much left.  Unless all your music sucks. 
Of course I think most of this idea is absurd.  I just had to say it. 
I'd still recommend RAID, but if you can, an off-site complete mirror is 
the best protection you can have.  I share a smaller music collection 
between friends, and it exists in full on a few different servers.

Joel

Joel Ebel wrote:
> 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.