I know some of you have huge media servers with many terabytes of storage. How do you back those puppies up?
Now that I got a modest raise, I'm planning some home network upgrades. Although my 6 year old file server still works fine and has ~1 TB of stuff on it, there's also the other computers that have varying amounts of stuff on them (my laptop being the biggest with hundreds of GB). And currently I don't have a good backup plan. Once in a while I'll back up the desktops/laptops to the file server and even rarer will I hook a 1 TB external drive up to the server and at least back up the important stuff. The MythTV HTPC hardly gets backed up at all, though most of what's on there I don't care much about, but that's about 800 GB of TV shows we never get around to watching.
There's a number of possibilities. The simplest would be to pick up a couple ~4TB external HDs and back up onto those, rotating between them and keeping one offsite. I'll probably want to encrypt them in case the offsite one gets lost/stolen (I'll probably keep it in a drawer at work). The drawback to these is I'll outgrow them if my total storage exceeds 4 TB in a few years, though I can stretch the backups by only backing up important files.
Another is to build a new file server and then use the old one as a backup. That's more complex and costly though and I don't have a lot of space to have a bunch of machines sitting around. Or buy a pre-built NAS.
I know there's tape drives, but how many can store multiple TBs on a tape? And how expensive? I haven't researched them.
The servers are all Linux (Ubuntu variants) so I'll probably just use rsync to back them up. Windows machines have Acronis on them and I generally back those up to the file server.
Now that I got a modest raise, I'm planning some home network upgrades. Although my 6 year old file server still works fine and has ~1 TB of stuff on it, there's also the other computers that have varying amounts of stuff on them (my laptop being the biggest with hundreds of GB). And currently I don't have a good backup plan. Once in a while I'll back up the desktops/laptops to the file server and even rarer will I hook a 1 TB external drive up to the server and at least back up the important stuff. The MythTV HTPC hardly gets backed up at all, though most of what's on there I don't care much about, but that's about 800 GB of TV shows we never get around to watching.
There's a number of possibilities. The simplest would be to pick up a couple ~4TB external HDs and back up onto those, rotating between them and keeping one offsite. I'll probably want to encrypt them in case the offsite one gets lost/stolen (I'll probably keep it in a drawer at work). The drawback to these is I'll outgrow them if my total storage exceeds 4 TB in a few years, though I can stretch the backups by only backing up important files.
Another is to build a new file server and then use the old one as a backup. That's more complex and costly though and I don't have a lot of space to have a bunch of machines sitting around. Or buy a pre-built NAS.
I know there's tape drives, but how many can store multiple TBs on a tape? And how expensive? I haven't researched them.
The servers are all Linux (Ubuntu variants) so I'll probably just use rsync to back them up. Windows machines have Acronis on them and I generally back those up to the file server.
Comment