Computer help

[Kwickkwack]

Hi to all you buffs out there.
I need a little bit of help from honest people not just someone who wants to spend as much of my money as they can.
I am looking at backing up data at work on several PCs, our main business software is backed up every night, its just all the other stuff I want to look at (word docs, excel sheets etc)
I was considering getting a networked hard drive and creating individual folders for each user on there, is it as simple as this, if not what do I have to consider.
There will be about 10 pcs on a lan that will be backed up if I can sort it out.
Cheers Guys

[Edders]

yeah a simple NAS (networked attached Storage ) system would do the job but remember your data only as secure as the media you put it on. I would spend a few pennies more on getting one with a raid5 system or at least a raid 1

Edders

[Kwickkwack]

Raid 5
Sounds like an armed response unit. I am only a simple guy, (very simple my wife says) what does this mean (plain english please)
Any Suggestions as to size / type / manufacturer

[robgt]

Having looked into this in a bit of detail recently, I decided to go for large (1 Terabyte) external hard drives to use as backup mediums.
The main reason was down to the file systems used on NAS and SAN devices. I decided to opt for something that would basically use NTFS (windows fille system) so that, if I need to I can simply plug the drive into another PC and drag files off it.

Cheers,
Rob

[choppertastic]

Having looked into this in a bit of detail recently, I decided to go for large (1 Terabyte) external hard drives to use as backup mediums.

I hope this is at least RAID1 mirrored as thats a lot of data if you get a drive failure.

[Edders]

either or
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=819191

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=722849

the bottom one doesnt have harddisks so the price goes up but it is scalable

Where I work we spend alot of time and money on storage systems. ands its not until you have a problem that you realise
A) how much teh data was really worth
b) how glad you are you spent teh extra money
c) the stupid fools who leave there 4 year research files on the desktop of their computer


Edders

[robgt]

I posted a link to the wrong drives in my post...

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/137327

Reason being that the drives I bought support eSATA, which is MASSIVELY faster at data transport than USB2 or Firewire. This drive actually supports all three, which is nice

Cheers,
Rob

[Edders]

lots of things spring to mind with this sort of question.

another thing is. is the data stored elsewhere ie ont he user computer and are you only guarding against the computer failing and not the user failing (ie deleting files, making changes) if your only concern is "the Users computers Failed" then as Rob suggested use a simple 1 or 2 disk storage system with either no raid or raid 1 ( Raid 1 is where the two disks have the same data on. a "mirror") and the chances of two disk failing at the same time are slim)
raid 5 is harder to explain so a cut and paste from the wiki

"RAID 5 (striped disks with parity) combines three or more disks in a way that protects data against loss of any one disk; the storage capacity of the array is reduced by one disk."

so if one disk fails you add a new one and the system rebuild the data from the "parity" disk

Edders

[jiberjaber]

Rob, you can get RAID5 NAS for about £1K - it is basicly a number of hard drives configured to provide resiliance, so if one drive dies you can stick in another and it will re-build it from the data is has spread over the other drives.

It realy depends on how vital you think the data you are backing up is?

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=693920
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=608188
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=423576
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=790358
£317 - £515 - £563 - £971 in that order

Then you need to decide on how much storage you want, 0.5G, 1G, 2G ??

2G would be 3 or 4 1G Sata drives, about £110 each - you should consider the "high duty" type of hard drives which have a guarentee related to them being on 24/7 and higher temperture ratings than "normal" drives - I think the Western Digital RE16's are an example.

You then need to consider how you are going to back up this lot / how you are going to stop the storage being abused (it might or might not be of course).

The above is all just thoughts, I have a RAID5 set up here at home, 0.5G but it is built into a linux server I have in the loft (it provides storage, downloading and media throughout the house).

Hope the above helps.

[jiberjaber]

Wow - a lot of replies whilst I was typing!

Oh - another thing to stick in the pot, if you go with the RAID option. The way the drives are written to by the box you put them in is different between manufacturers - so if your box dies for some reason, you need to at least buy from the same manufacturer! You generaly cant just stick the drives in a box from someone else.

There is also things like "hardware" and "software" RAID, first one is very expensive, all donky work of writting data in teh correct format to the drive is donw by a chip or two, the latter (software) is cheaper but slower, standard hardware with soem software is used to write the data.

We all know the speed at which manufacturers put out new kit, so when I considered this, it was safer to go down the route of a linux server as there will always be linux! LOL

There are free linux distrobutions which provide NAS functionality if you want to build your own using an old (or new cheapo) PC, linux option is generaly software based and is a little slow, but if it is just data you are sticking on there, it shouldnt matter a whole heap (thought I am not sure what it would be like with 10 users).

You can pay for a configured NAS distro (Naslite etc)
http://www.serverelements.com/
Or you can cook your own from any of the free linux distros on the web:
Fedora, Ubuntu, Slackware, etc...

[glen_j]

are the files stored on a central server of are they stored on each users pc? if they are stored on a central server it might be worth looking into tape backups as they are much more mobile and a set of tapes could be stored off site somewhere incase the worst should happen this is not particularly cheap but is widely used in the industry, if they are stored on each pc you could buy a network attached storage device and set windows backup to automatically backup to this drive once a day or once a week in fact you could have it back up as often as you like. this way you won't have to rely on users copying thier files to the backup drive. if you wan't any more info on this pm me and i'll give you all the help i can.

[Biggles]

The question is how important is your data????

If your are a home user then a raid 1 config is a the way to go however I would also look seriously into a tape back up system. depending on how much data it saves will depend on how much you want to spend. A basic sony ait system will save 25gigs native and 50gigs compressed but a HP Ultrium system will save 500gigs and beyond (but at a much higher cost).

If you are also looking at saving 500gigs of data then a quite fast tape system is needed.

Nas is ok but at the end of the day it is a machine which can fail.

[Kwickkwack]

Thanks for all your replies guys, this is for local data on individual machines. the main business data is sored on a mirror disc in the server, is dat backed up every night and also backed to another pc in the other building. So I will look at a simple NAS system as suggested but Edders.
Cheers

[jboweruk]

How big is the hdd in the Server? Could you not set aside some space on that to backup the users' data as well? Alternatively, Maplins sell a wireless USB Server, and also a hard drive plug and go caddy, you could use the caddy to pop a hdd in, and keep the caddy plugged into the USB Server. That way you can just get a new hdd when the original backup is full. I believe the USB Server also plugs into LAN so shouldn't be too hard to set up.

http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?...223905&doy=8m6
http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?...0drive&doy=8m6

There's some links added to the devices I'm talking about, but I'm sure the USB Server was cheaper before so look into that.