Drowning in data; what to do with it all?

Village_Idiot wrote in post #10448157
This,

http://www.newegg.com …rt-_-59-105-563-_-Product

sir would solve all of your problems........

Not to be a gadfly here.....but if your house was on fire or experiencing a trembler (in my neck of the woods) how exactly do you plan to transport this contraption out of your house????

"Sorry honey, I gotta rescue by HP MediaSmart Home Server before I go for the kids and the cat."

MIRRORED Off site storage is what solves your data problems. That's what lets you walk out of your burning house, knowing full well that most of your data is safe in grandma's house (or work) when your house is burning down.

And if your house and grandma's house (or work) are both on fire at the same time you got bigger problem in life than your photos.

gjman wrote in post #10453943
Not to be a gadfly here.....but if your house was on fire or experiencing a trembler (in my neck of the woods) how exactly do you plan to transport this contraption out of your house????

"Sorry honey, I gotta rescue by HP MediaSmart Home Server before I go for the kids and the cat."

MIRRORED Off site storage is what solves your data problems. That's what lets you walk out of your burning house, knowing full well that most of your data is safe in grandma's house (or work) when your house is burning down.

And if your house and grandma's house (or work) are both on fire at the same time you got bigger problem in life than your photos.

You can back up the server itself and store it off site. But the physical dimensions are probably about 12"x8"x6". It's rather small.

But mirrored off site storage doesn't necessarily solve your data problem. It may solve your back up problem, but what if you need something that's being stored off site? Are you going to drive to where ever you have it and pick it up in the middle of the night? A server allows for on site storage to be acheived, which can also help to protect against data loss and can aid in keeping everything you need in a centralized location that can be accessed from multiple PCs.

I watch movies that stream to my PS3, have access to my music library from anywhere in the house, download files to the server than I can access from any of my computers regardless of whether or not they're Windows or OS X or partitioned to NTFS or HFS, edit and transfer files between my laptop and desktop, and access it remotely over the web when needed.

It's more than just data storage.

Village_Idiot wrote in post #10461114
...........But the physical dimensions are probably about 12"x8"x6". It's rather small...............Bu​t mirrored off site storage doesn't necessarily solve your data problem. It may solve your back up problem, but what if you need something that's being stored off site? Are you going to drive to where ever you have it and pick it up in the middle of the night............ everything you need in a centralized location that can be accessed from multiple PCs..........I watch movies that stream to my PS3, have access to my music library from anywhere in the house, download files to the server than I can access from any of my computers regardless of whether or not they're Windows or OS X or partitioned to NTFS or HFS, edit and transfer files between my laptop and desktop, and access it remotely over the web when needed.....It's more than just data storage.

Errr I think I may not have been clear. By MIRRORED off-site storage I mean that a copy (mirror image) of the original is stored off site. You keep one copy at home and one off site. Off site can be your place of work or grandma's house. You don't need to drive anywhere to get to your data, if you have access to the master/original you have the data. Every week/two weeks or month you back up the copy that you have at home and take it to grandma's house (in my case its my office at work) and bring back the one that had stored there.

If your house is on fire or have an earthquake.....you simply run out of your house with only your loved ones, you leave EVERYTHING behind..including the back up....since you have a MIRROR image in grandma's house you don't need anything. Your data is safe. So its 12"x8"x6" vs nothing.

If you have a work group at home you can pretty much view/edit any file on your network...including ISOs (if you network is set up for it...mine is not and all my ISOs are on my HTPC all my CR2 are on the photo PC, I don't mix things. Maybe a couple of JPEGs on the HTPC but no CR2).

Now you have me beat on the OS X thingy...but I am not sure what exactly I am missing.

You completely missed it.

Instead of having a ton of external hard drives, he could have one server that would also provide other functions. You can back up the server to an external hard drive and store it off site if you wanted. That was my point. I wasn't saying the server was the ultimate back up solution by itself, I was saying that it would take care of the need to have multiple external HDD's sitting around and trying to get them to work together. Plus it would provide redundancy automatically. If he had one of those drives fail, he would have to recover the data from it. With WHS, ou pull the bad drive, swap in another, and go to it.

Every "server" in the real world that has critical data is backed up to tapes (DLT) and one copy of the tapes are stored off site (usually in a fire/flood/earthquake proof vault depending on the organization). They swap out the tapes periodically so the most updated version goes into the vault. That is how they recover from catastrophic failure. Like the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

How does WHS solve the issue of having a copy of your data off site? You still have one central data storage device with no back up.

tapes? tapes have about a 40-60% failure rate. it's frightening to realize the larger your data set, the more likely SOME of it is going to come back corrupted on tape. (which tends to ruin the entire backup set, depending on your archiving solution)

The only really bullet proof solution is an ongoing sync between the local system and a remote system, both of which are live. The odd thing is, it really isn't very expensive to get cheap storage in someone's data center. Google charges $50 a YEAR for 200G of storage. That they protect, backup to redundant drive systems and keep cool and protected for power and bandwidth 24x7.

if you set it up right, the nightly or ongoing sync only happens when you aren't messing with the data, so it doesn't impact you and if you lose your primary, you have instant access to your data, as soon as you can get to a machine and some internet.

There are plenty of straightforward solutions available, but you have define the problem first, before going down the 'home media server vs USB drives vs off site storage' path.

I'd always keep my data on internal drives where I can... especially If I have to access it often and need speed.

If I had to go for mass external storage I'd at least go for an eSATA drive.

Flores wrote in post #10468226
tapes? tapes have about a 40-60% failure rate. it's frightening to realize the larger your data set, the more likely SOME of it is going to come back corrupted on tape. (which tends to ruin the entire backup set, depending on your archiving solution)

The only really bullet proof solution is an ongoing sync between the local system and a remote system, both of which are live. The odd thing is, it really isn't very expensive to get cheap storage in someone's data center. Google charges $50 a YEAR for 200G of storage. That they protect, backup to redundant drive systems and keep cool and protected for power and bandwidth 24x7...........

For this discussion we are comparing bare HDD to "tapes". I am not sure what sort of tapes you use or how they are handled but our tapes are rotated out and they rarely fail. Even our remote shadow has a tape back up. After the 94 earthquake we had data up and running but no structurally sound buildings to use the data. Go figure.

This gets us back to eSATA HDD being used as DLT. If your house burns down you simply walk out leaving EVERYTHING behind. Your data is stored on the off site mirrored SATA HDD. If you have the pressing urge to view your photos/ISO/mp3 you can plug in your back up copy to the next available windows computer and you have ALL your data....but your family will still not have roof.

I think what some of you are not understanding is that eSATA based back up is a system not just the hardware.

We might need a STICKY with pictures for people to really get what I am talking about.

Now if you don't have a grandma's house/place of work/safety deposit box/friend/mother-in-law or any place that is secure but close enough...and have some affinity to moths (and a well in your basement) like Buffalo Bill then this will not work.

I think we are in violent agreement, but using different language

from a D.I.Y. point of view, what you are saying is bang on. but from a usability and survivability point of view, hire out the storage to someone. backups vs 'live' data no longer makes sense, now that the price of 'live' storage is so cheap.

Tapes make sense when they are cheaper to maintain and manage than 'live' hard drives sitting in a storage system, in a remote location with plenty of network supporting it. That is rapidly changing, it's being seen now by the guys who where backing up petabytes worth of data to tape libraries, and is working it's way down hill rapidly.

gjman wrote in post #10467238
Every "server" in the real world that has critical data is backed up to tapes (DLT) and one copy of the tapes are stored off site (usually in a fire/flood/earthquake proof vault depending on the organization). They swap out the tapes periodically so the most updated version goes into the vault. That is how they recover from catastrophic failure. Like the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

How does WHS solve the issue of having a copy of your data off site? You still have one central data storage device with no back up.

Village_Idiot wrote in post #10466939
You completely missed it.

Instead of having a ton of external hard drives, he could have one server that would also provide other functions. You can back up the server to an external hard drive and store it off site if you wanted. That was my point. I wasn't saying the server was the ultimate back up solution by itself, I was saying that it would take care of the need to have multiple external HDD's sitting around and trying to get them to work together. Plus it would provide redundancy automatically. If he had one of those drives fail, he would have to recover the data from it. With WHS, ou pull the bad drive, swap in another, and go to it.

WHS has the ability to back up the data on the server to external drives and you can obviously take those external HDDs off site if you so choose.

http://lifehacker.com …rver-to-an-external-drive