One of the biggest issues in modern IT is storing all that data. I know that I have drives coming out of my ears at home and it still is not enough. I have over 3TB of current storage divided into active data and incremental backup storage. I still do not feel as safe as I’d like. None of the drives are RAIDed but Data is duplicated at least once depending on importance.
Over the next year I predict that I will need another 2-6TB of storage to cope with added data volumes (I intend on starting to film in 1080p resolution which is about 4GB for 15min of video). Currently the largest available drives are 2TB at a cost of about $300. The issue is not with the drive itself though. It is about how and where do I connect the drive to the network.
External USB/FW drives are too slow for real use (they are OK for incremental local backups though). So the remaining solution is some kind of NAS. My HTPC/Mac (see below) will fulfill that function. It is attached via 1Gbps Ethernet and has six drive bays available and a large power supply. The unit already sports a 250GB boot drive and a 1.5TB data drive. The issue is that with that all the SATA ports on the Atom board are used. So the next drive will have to be attached to an extra SATA PCI card (which will have to be Mac compatible).
The new Snow Leopard also supports wake-on-use. That means the machine will wake on access of a drive. Currently I still need to wake it manually via WoL. Remains to be seen when Snow Leopard (10.6) will be “available” on the Intel Atom boards with all needed features supported.
The issues I have with data in my private home start to mirror what has been happening for quite a while in the datacentres. Not only does that mean I need ever more technical know-how at home to cope but it also means that something like the solution below gets interesting.
http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/
This is of-course too large for private use but it does solve some of the issues you might encounter when building your own NAS.
One other thing that is hugely annoying in NZ is the lack of broadband flatrates. This effectively prevents you from performing sorely needed and large off-site backups. Currently I solve this problem by storing a USB hard drive off site. This HDD contains a copy of the most important data that I have (by no means all the data!).
So, what have you done for your backup today?
