+ - Distributed Backup Solution For Personal Data?
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Rozine
Rozine writes "Recently, a friend and I bought some components to build a backup server system for our personal data (as well as that of some non-programmer but engineer parents). We'll have two nearly identical servers 350 miles apart. Storage is 3 1TB drives each, although we'd like the ability to add more drives as we need to. The OS (Linux) will run off a 4GB USB flash drive. The hardware will do its job, but we're looking for good software to handle our needs. Google has no shortage of suggestions, but we'd like to see if anyone on Slashdot has experience with this — what works and what doesn't. We trust each other completely, and don't mind sending unencrypted data to the counterpart server (as long as it's encrypted along the way via something like SSH), but we want the actual stored data to be encrypted, and no keys stored on the server itself — the key should be sent from the client computer if encryption is handled by the server. We also would like two modes: one where we can manually load files into the backup system and have them persist, and one where entire directories are backed up automatically and transparently. We'd also like to use the stored files regularly — this isn't a store-and-forget system. This would have to support client computers running Windows (XP mostly, although 98-2000 would also be helpful), several flavors of Linux, and an early Mac OS X system (10.2, PPC). Some versioning for backed-up files would be helpful as well — we really want to avoid having an accidental delete propagate throughout the backup servers — that's not much of a backup. Since we have some non-techies using the system, it would be very nice if it could be simple and transparent to use. Requiring some expertise to set up is ok, since we're both *NIX programmers in our day jobs. Does such a software package exist, and is it free (gratis) and/or free (libre)?
Also, do you recommend RAID 5 for our situation? We don't want to lose data, but the system is distributed, meaning we'd have to lose the same drive on both systems to lose data. Sacrificing 1/3 of the storage is unpleasant, but if necessary we can do it.
Other suggestions are also welcome, especially if it's something that we might not have considered."
Also, do you recommend RAID 5 for our situation? We don't want to lose data, but the system is distributed, meaning we'd have to lose the same drive on both systems to lose data. Sacrificing 1/3 of the storage is unpleasant, but if necessary we can do it.
Other suggestions are also welcome, especially if it's something that we might not have considered."
Distributed Backup Solution For Personal Data? More Login
Distributed Backup Solution For Personal Data?