Hi, I'm running at 979Gb on a Seagate 1.5TB drive. I have a duplicate drive and am using a manual process to backup the data - this works by moving data from a current folder across into two archives weekly - although this works it does take a bit of time. I previously had an external duplicate running on eSATA that would automatically synchronize on Seagate software but this had troubles and began re-syncing the master drive to the backup drives files. (This drive later stated that it needed a service so it's not in use). I'm planning on buying a third drive to have two copies and one master - when I do this I'd ideally like to have an automated backup and a guarantee that the master drive cannot be altered by the system. Any help and advice that you may be able to share will be greatly appreciated...
Ideas on a backup for system for a 1.5TB system - software, harwdare, pls recomme I don't know if you will find this relevant for this situation, but your story sounds similar to something I was dealing with a while back. What I ended up doing was building a software RAID array in a dedicated Linux server, and sharing the data both locally to my network and remotely via SFTP. All my data is accessible anywhere, I can survive a hard drive crash without losing data, and I've never had a problem with this setup. In fact, I've never lost any data at all using this approach.
Ideas on a backup for system for a 1.5TB system - software, harwdare, pls recomme This sounds like a good idea. So you have a pc running, that shares all its data, with the Linux RAID server, over a network. This automatically catches any data generated on the PC and saves it across the RAID array. This does sound a little tricky, was it easy to setup? ...
Ideas on a backup for system for a 1.5TB system - software, harwdare, pls recomme To clarify, my workstation, my wife's workstation, and my media appliance can all access data on my fileserver from over the LAN. From remotely, I'm allowing access to my server via SSH/SFTP, which is thoroughly encrypted but more straightforward than a VPN. The software involved was free, setup process wasn't very difficult, and Linux has a software RAID that's second to none. I'm using a RAID-5 since it's the most cost-effective for redundancy, but Linux supports RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 4, RAID 5, RAID 6 and all combinations of each (e.g. RAID 10, RAID 50, etc). Mine runs CentOS, but any distro would probably do. There are also specialized SOHO server distros, like SME Server or EnGarde Secure Linux, which offer an appliance-like setup and interface. There's also a FreeBSD-based distro called FreeNAS which is supposed to be quite good, though FreeBSD doesn't quite have the robust filesystem or software RAID support of Linux. If all this sounds confusing, don't worry, it's not nearly as crazy as I've made it sound. Also, there are quite a few Linux people on these forums that can help you out if you get stuck, including me. If this still sounds out of your league, you could always buy an embedded Linux/Unix appliance like the Synology CS407e. Not as cost-effective as a DIY Linux NAS, but it would be something you could essentially unbox and use right away.
