Re: [Hampshire] Cheap and Easy NAS

2009/2/25 Stephen Nelson-Smith <sanelson@???>:
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Philip Stubbs <philip@???> wrote:
>> Hi Everyone,
>>
>> It is about time that I had a proper back-up solution for my home
>> machines.
>
> Jolly good.  Now let's define what that means - what failure scenarios
> are you trying to prepare for?  For example, do you care about your
> data if your  house is destroyed, and your machines with it?  If you
> do, you need your backup to be offsite.  There are many
> considerations, but let's start there.

To be honest, if my house burns down, what is on the computer will be
the least of my concerns. That said, my server is in the shed which is
at the bottom of the garden, so for really important stuff, that is
off-site enough for me. :-)

I know that many are amazed at how slack some peoples backups are, and
I know that my current situation is among them. However, in my
defence, my computer is more a toy than a business tool. My life would
not grind to a halt should all my computers go up in a puff of smoke.

That said, I have now got a few gigs of photos that I would like to
protect. Also, some things would be a pain to have to create again if
lost. Therefore, although I am currently protected enough for what I
use the computer for, I want to find a more automated system. I could
simply use rsync to automate the process between machines, but I don't
have enough drive space. So, if I am going to get more disk space, I
thought that I may at the same time look at a simple NAS device. The
main reason for this is that it will be independent of any single
machine. That will allow me to play around with different distro's
etc. on one machine without screwing with the backup solution for any
other machines. Does that make sense? I currently have a cold and
therefore my thinking is a bit foggy.

All I worry about is a drive failure. It has happened before, and will
happen again. I don't need to be able to go back X number of days for
a previous version of Y or recover deleted Z.

I remember seeing a simple device that would allow USB hard drives to
be connected. This is the sort of thing that I had in mind, but
wondered if anybody had any experience with something like this a bit
more recently.

Thanks.
--
Philip Stubbs