My backup system
March 18th, 2008 | Filed under Personal, Technology, blog365.I own a number of computers and, like most people now have a network to connect them all together (except I was running networks back when coax-cable was the in thing to use). The system works quite nicely given it is made from junk parts. Since the estate agents didn’t visit today I used the time to sort out my server and tidy up its storage arrangements.
I think I’ve found a cheap way of backing up the large amounts of data that live on my server.
In my house I have a Macbook, a desktop PC running Windows and Linux, and occasionally I bring my laptop home from work to use. There’s also my Nokia N800 and my Wifi enabled “Internet Radio” and my modchipped XBox running XBMC. All these devices chatter with the Internet through the router provided by my ISP (BeInternet), and everything at some point needs to access files.
Sat whirring away in my cupboard is a giant PC in a cube shaped case. This machine, made from the bits of other computers is, through no accident, called ‘Phoenix’ and it is my main server. Inside this monster sits five hard disks of varying size - the smallest being 40GB and the largest being 160GB. They store all my music, photos, video, documents and the operating system (Linux, naturally). The other computers also send backups to Phoenix using everything from Time Machine on my Mac to Cobian Backup in Windows.
There’s so many disks in this machine because I’ve just kept adding to the storage over the years. Things are getting a bit stuffed in there so I decided to reorganise the data. I’d eventually like to pull all the disks out and start again from scratch with maybe two 500GB SATA drives and a small drive for the OS. I’m undecided about using RAID, it sounds useful but adds another layer of complexity to the system - I don’t fancy the idea of the raid set corrupting and taking out both disks.
I use the very affordable rsync.net to send nightly backups of the most important data I have offsite. I’ve only bought 11GB of space, so can’t send everything - and I wouldn’t want to, there’s too much to send over the Internet, it’d take weeks. Since I can’t send all my data off the disks in my server I need another way of providing some redundancy.
In my desktop PC there is a 160GB drive with an 80GB data partition that is mostly empty - all the important data being stored on my server, obviously. It’s just got some large downloads and junk on. Inside my Mac is an 80GB drive that’s half full.
So now what I do is send my photos - 7GB - to my Mac as a backup, and when I’ve made sure the data on my desktop machine isn’t important, I’ll send all my music to it - 40GB - to back that up.
