Backup solution

[filburt1]

What would you recommend as a backup solution for computers on a home network? Right now, the only two I care about:

• My tablet PC (40 GB)
• My desktop (374 GB, at the very most 274 GB I'd care about backing up, usually around 80 GB; 74 GB is in a potentially volitile RAID 0 setup where if one of the two drives fails, I'm screwed)

I was thinking either putting an old crappy computer on the LAN and using it just as a storage server or some NAS solution which can be fairly expensive. I don't want to back up to either the tablet or desktop in case something like a power supply blows and takes the drives with it.

My current situation is do nothing for the desktop (not enough space) and use Norton Ghost to do full backups to a share on my desktop where 40 GB is not that bad. I don't want to burn to DVDs or CDs because I don't want to go through hundreds of them each month (this would be a weekly backup, probably).

It would be groovy if a Windows 2003 Server solution existed where I could set up a crappy computer and use it for both this storage and my Outlook synchronizing solution.

[Zachery]

You could always build yourself one hell of a storage box (large space) and do backups to it. But even that has a chance to fail, DVDs or CD's are good but they can be broken or get lost. A large storage box with raid 1 sounds like the most best solution to me.

[filburt1]

Price is a major consideration, unfortunately, so SATA or god forbid SCSI RAID 1 would be expensive. Yes I realize I'll have a heart attack if one of my systems dies and I find out so did the server's drive.

The computer I'm thinking about using is a P2-400. It needs memory, though, but even 512 MB would be enough for a storage server. I think it'll just run 2003 Server.

[Zachery]

I priced out a file storage box (just that, no raid) 3-4 months ago for 1.6TB would run me about 1300. Thats not cheap, but its far from expensive if your data goes.

[filburt1]

I priced out a file storage box (just that, no raid) 3-4 months ago for 1.6TB would run me about 1300. Thats not cheap, but its far from expensive if your data goes.

That's way more space than I'll need for years. Even 300 GB would be enough because some stuff like programs I would want to be destroyed so they can be cleanly reinstalled. For my tablet, the entire system will have to be imaged, but for the desktop, I only want specific folders on specific drives which drastically cuts down on the space requirements.

[colicab-d]

What about a tape drive? My old Highschool used to do that, nightly backups but christ knows the price of the tapes or there storage, plus it was probs just registrys etc they backed up so dunno really.

[filburt1]

It depends on how big the tapes can be and how expensive they and their drives are. I imagine it's insanely expensive, plus slow, although higher capacity than most optical media.