Re:The Poor Man's RAID Array (Score 1)

I have to agree with timeOday...

My partner and I work with video... and we were sick of backing up our projects to tape.

This is what I just set up for our home office.

I had a old server case (Antec) with a p4 2.8Ghz in it. It had previously had a raid5 array of 3 x 40GB disks + a hot spare that was used for video production.

I added a gigabit ethernet card, a cheap 2 port SATA controller and an external sata back plate (to connect one of the SATA channels externally). I purchased 3 x 250Gb seagate HDDs and put 2 of them into these SATA only (no USB no Firwire) external enclosures. Because they have minimal electronics they are very cheap ($AU55) and because it it SATA all the way very fast.

I installed centos and partitioned the drive with 4 partitions (/ /boot /swap /home). I used samba to share a user under /home which we can write to from our Macs, Windows and Linux laptops.

I disconnected the internal drive and installed centos again on each of the external drives to ensure that the partition structure is the same (I know i could have used DD but i didn't). Then I reconnected the internal and left one external connected.

Every 2 hours (it's not left on 24/7) the machine uses rsync to backup the internal drive to the external drive. It writes a log which include a df -h to the share so all users can confirm the backup process is working. Each week we swap the external drive for the spare which we keep in a fireproof box.

If the hdd in the machine ever fails all we need to do is swap it for the most up to date external. As we fill the 250GB we will archive off projects to offline pairs of external drives.

This gives us a double redundant simple to restore file server with true backup.

To do this I mostly used this howto

Cheers

Nick

I still have some issues, especially with speed. It takes WAY to long to backup 100GB over the network... I figured it would take a few hours... but it seems to take closer to a day... not sure if it is the PCI bus not dealing with the back up to disc happening at the same time as the large file transfer over the gigabit network... or a poor configuration of samba/smb...

any hints?

del.icio.us/cicada for more useful links on this topic.