I need a better backup solution

bwana

bwana

MyBroadband
Super Moderator
Joined
Feb 23, 2005
Messages
97,632
Reaction score
37,749
Location
Plz
After spending a considerable amount of time looking for a photo last night I've come to believe I need a better backup solution…

IMG_8480.jpg

That's almost five years of photos that I want to backup. Call it 20TB with a growth rate of 4TB per year so it needs to be expandable.

I do have plenty of PC parts so building something out of that is a possibility.

I need to be able to scan through the images from my laptop so wifi is out.

And yes - that old iPod is being used as a mass storage device :o
 
Drobo Enterprise solution?

edit : you'll need to divert some funds from No1 to be able to do that... those things are insanely expensive...
 
bwana said:
I'll check that out if the page ever loads - my internet seems to have gone elsewhere…
Click to expand...

Relevant Excerpt

The build I eventually went for was as follows:

Antec 1200 case
Asus M4A785TD-V-Evo motherboard
AMD Athlon II X2 245 Regor Core AM3 2.9ghz processor
4GB of Corsair Dominator DDR RAM
Corsair 650w PSU
Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 SATA expansion card
2 x 3Ware forward SATA breakout cables
San Disk Cruzer Micro 2GB USB drive
USB motherboard adapter
4 x X-Case 5-in-3 hotswap HDD cages
unRAID Pro Server license
10 x 2TB Seagate Barracuda LP HDDs
3 x 2TB Samsung F3 LP HDDs

Estimated at 2000 pounds - so roughly 40K
Click to expand...
 
The_Librarian said:
Drobo Enterprise solution?

edit : you'll need to divert some funds from No1 to be able to do that... those things are insanely expensive...
Click to expand...

The only problem with Drobo is the propitiatory raid that it uses.

Got burnt at a previous company I worked out - 2 drives failed at the same time and we couldn't recover the data.

Even a data recovery place wasn't able to help us.
 
AfricanTech said:
Relevant Excerpt

The build I eventually went for was as follows:
Click to expand...

R40k? Maybe I need to rethink backing everything up…

Converting all the raw files to JPG could potentially save a lot of space.
 
Last edited:
Get a bluray writeable drive, each disk holds 25GB (the single layer ones)
Then keep an index directory with low quality snapshots of what is on the disk.

Pro's
cheaper and easier to manage than a stack of hdd
easier to transport (always worried about transporting naked hdd)
easier to make multiple copies
writer about R1200
5 disks (125GB for the pack) about R120

Cons
No idea how long the disks will last (after 5 years I see no problems yet)
Effort to keep the index directory updated
Small effort to fetch the correct disk
Takes about an hour to write the 25GB (you can do multiple sessions per disk e.g write it in 1GB chunks as you do backups)

Or maybe this is just crazy you will need 800 disks for your 20TB :p (R19k just for the writeable disks). :sick:
 
Last edited:
biena said:
Get a bluray writeable drive, each disk holds 25GB (the single layer ones)
Then keep an index directory with low quality snapshots of what is on the disk.
Click to expand...
I work on an archive system - I'll have all the rugby for a year in one archive, same goes for the soccer for the year, cricket for the year, and so on - and only the smallest of those will fit on a 25gb disk.

Indexing all my current drives would be a sensible place to start though.
 
bwana said:
After spending a considerable amount of time looking for a photo last night I've come to believe I need a better backup solution…

View attachment 235256

That's almost five years of photos that I want to backup. Call it 20TB with a growth rate of 4TB per year so it needs to be expandable.

I do have plenty of PC parts so building something out of that is a possibility.

I need to be able to scan through the images from my laptop so wifi is out.

And yes - that old iPod is being used as a mass storage device :o
Click to expand...

Server definitely. Maybe a Microserver?
 
Necropolis said:
The only problem with Drobo is the propitiatory raid that it uses.

Got burnt at a previous company I worked out - 2 drives failed at the same time and we couldn't recover the data.

Even a data recovery place wasn't able to help us.
Click to expand...

Eish, now that's not good... supposed to be "better" than the rest...

Thanks for sharing, will not be considering Drobo anymore.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X