Looking for a student priced backup solution

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veritas7

Gawd
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Nov 7, 2007
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Hay all, wondering what would be the easiest way to go on backing up my data on a small budget. I'm currently sitting on a 250 7200.11 GB Seagate, and 2 250 Maxtors from an old Dell (which who knows will crap out any day) in my computer.

Anyway, back when I got the additional Seagate, I bought myself a new external hard drive. That's what I've been doing for backups - the painful and expensive external hard drives. They're becoming a nuisance and overall, a hassle to put up with as I have limited space, more wires, and more heat coming from them.

I have an Aluratek 500GB to cover the two Maxtors and another old Iomega 250GB external that covers my main OS/music Seagate hard drive.

I've been thinking about upgrading to newer disks (some 640GB WDs) and with this new space, I've think I need an upgrade to my backup solution.

What should I do? Splurge on some external raid enclosure? Or buy even more disks and go some sort of raid? (I have a Abit IP35 Pro FYI for raid controller info)

The only RAID setup I've done in the past is RAID 0 on my old Dell. I have little/no experience in this area and I was wondering what would be the best solution for a tight money/space solution for a student myself.

TIA
 
Buy 1TB drives and external enclosures...dirty, cheap, and simple. The only thing it requires is time...which honestly, students have a lot of.
 
Trepidati0n said:
Buy 1TB drives and external enclosures...dirty, cheap, and simple. The only thing it requires is time...which honestly, students have a lot of.
Click to expand...

qft, that is what I would do.
 
Alright. What 1 TB drive and enclosure would you reccomend?

I guess I'd like an enclosure with if possible with eSATA.
 
veritas7 said:
Alright. What 1 TB drive and enclosure would you reccomend?

I guess I'd like an enclosure with if possible with eSATA.
Click to expand...


Well you have a few options, you can pick an expandable enclosure, in which you can add more drives in the future. A good expandable enclosure is the Venus T4S, which holds 4 drives and a SATA multiplier... this allows you to push 4TB using existing 1tb units. It will also help reduce your clutter instead of multiple external units. It is also super tiny, has good cooling, and internal PSU (no power brick).


Your other option is to get a premade usb/firewire/esata drive unit.
 
Just get the cheapest WD, Seagate, Hitachi or Samsung 1TB drive you can find. For backup purposes, you don't need a special or certain drive.

Enclosure wise, don't have any recommendations. I usually buy external drives when they're on sale.
 
Anything wrong with using internals for backups?

I just manually have two copies of things I would prefer not to lose. Most of my stuff is disposable (those save games and porn really aren't worth backing up OP :)) So just have two copies of things that really matter, and if one drive dies theres always the other!
 
Waffletron said:
Anything wrong with using internals for backups?
Click to expand...

A couple of things in fact:
- The computer could die and take out the drives
- A virus can fuck up the drives
- You may accidentally reformat the drives
 
Waffletron said:
Anything wrong with using internals for backups?

I just manually have two copies of things I would prefer not to lose. Most of my stuff is disposable (those save games and porn really aren't worth backing up OP :)) So just have two copies of things that really matter, and if one drive dies theres always the other!
Click to expand...

well if a virus gets u then u loose both copies unless u remove power to the spare drive.
 
Well, I guess he meant, as well as I am meaning too (from seeing before), some sort of RAID way where it mirrors the drives through the controller, not the OS... RAID 1 right? And the drive isn't visible (to access) to the OS too?

Anyway, that Venus enclosure looks nice but realy pricey.. I'm thinking about it as it's probably a good solution for multiple drives in the future, but still, the price, but you get what you pay for.

For my drive I was thinking

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

and

Rosewill RX-358-S SLV (Silver) 3.5" SATA to USB & eSATA Ext. Enclosure w/Int.80mm fan - Retail
 
Should I go with a NAS solution?

That Venus T4S enclosure reccomended earlier in the thread wasn't too high regarded at many sites that had reviews... and I read that the company has very poor support/material to cover their products. I'd hate to buy from a company that goes belly up soon. Either the enclosures lack proper cooling, support, or functionality (i.e. my eSATA).
 
veritas7 said:
Should I go with a NAS solution?

That Venus T4S enclosure reccomended earlier in the thread wasn't too high regarded at many sites that had reviews... and I read that the company has very poor support/material to cover their products. I'd hate to buy from a company that goes belly up soon. Either the enclosures lack proper cooling, support, or functionality (i.e. my eSATA).
Click to expand...

I have personally used that unit heavily with 4 drives and I see no issue with the unit. There isn't much support or materials you need on a standalone enclosure.

Anyways, suggestions have been posted.


You can do a NAS device setup but be prepared to pay good money for a decent solution, my recomendation would be to look at an HP unit, which starts at $600
 
for about $300 i built my own nas and redid my remaining network to gigabit architecture.
 
Danny Bui said:
A couple of things in fact:
- The computer could die and take out the drives
- A virus can fuck up the drives
- You may accidentally reformat the drives
Click to expand...

Thanks guys, I think that you just may have made some homebrew NAS a higher priority than it was before. :D
 
Syntax Error said:
Buffalo 1TB Drivestation?
Click to expand...

Horrible reviews on every review site I've gone to.

I might as well just go with a NAS / or that Rosewill enclosure with a 1 TB drive.

But with those multiple enclosure / NAS can I use different size drives? I mean, after I get new WD640s, I will have an extra 7200.11 250GB Seagate, and 3 250GB Maxtors. That alone is worth something but I can't just simply discard them, might as well put them to use for backup or something.
 
Tbh, most "consumer-grade" data isn't worth backing up, even though backing up is inexpensive.

The key to a successful backup strat isn't to throw more storage space at it, but to figure out what actually needs to be backed up, and to which extend (i.e. a single DVD can hold a few thousand MP3s, burn a second one to have two in case the dog eats one, and you spend less than $0.50 to take care of your music collection).

Porn, ripped movies, etc., are hardly worth backing up, YMMV of course.

By the time you get down to the really essential files, odds are the data volume is small enough to just email that stuff to yourself on gmail and be done with it.
 
I think it really does depend on exactly how much data you want to store and how important it is. There are lots of backup options, but you do need to figure out exactly what your important data is and how much you have.
Uber important critical stuff might just fit on a dvd or two. Pictures can be stored online through picasa/webshots/flikr and some important stuff can be compressed and saved on gmail. Your music collection might fit on an ipod or an external portable hard drive...
I would pick up an external laptop hard drive and store my important docs/pics/files. 500GB for $200 or 320GB for $130 on sale... Theyre smaller/dont need a power brick/and can be stored safely in the safe of your choice.

If you have the budget and need hundreds of GB, you could go for an AutoRaid capable Drobo ($350ish-%20 Live search, check ebay) external USB enclosure + 1TB drives or get a cheap Promise NAS from Fry's when it goes on sale for $300 . It offers 4 drive raid5/mirror for just basic windows share/ftp/nfs backup. It goes on sale every so often, if your willing to wait. The DRobo allows you to add drives as needed. I think the Promise one does too, but I haven't checked it. The Infrant/Netgear ReadyNAS also allows you to add drives as needed, but costs significantly more.

If you have a webhosting or colocation, you can also store files there as an offsite. You can also stick the portable usb drive at a friends house, work, or a safe/lockbox somewhere.
 
Thanks for the responses.

I think I've narrowed it down, and I'm going to double check the bank before I make the plunge.

The Drobo looks very nice but only having USB is a bummer... if it had firewire/eSATA that would be an instant buy for me.

So it's pretty much down whether to get the Drobo with slow write speeds, or that 1T+enclosure, but like speed really matters when it's a backup (but when it starts to add up if I add several disk images and FLAC files in one day and it's suppose to backup D:)
 
Thuleman said:
Porn, ripped movies, etc., are hardly worth backing up, YMMV of course.
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THE HUMANITY! :eek: :( That is the single most important thing for backing up :D :p

veritas7 said:
Thanks for the responses.

I think I've narrowed it down, and I'm going to double check the bank before I make the plunge.

The Drobo looks very nice but only having USB is a bummer... if it had firewire/eSATA that would be an instant buy for me.

So it's pretty much down whether to get the Drobo with slow write speeds, or that 1T+enclosure, but like speed really matters when it's a backup (but when it starts to add up if I add several disk images and FLAC files in one day and it's suppose to backup D:)
Click to expand...


If you are looking at the drobo as a backup solution then you aren't looking at a serious solution. While the drobo is cool,it's not going to yeild even near the same performance as an esata enclosure.

If you are looking at the drobo (since they are so overpriced), the my recomendation would be to take a look at the HP Smart Server with Windows Home Server. It has great software that can make images of your systems for backups and it's performance will make the drobo cry.
 
Windows home server is awesome.

I just graduated college and went with that for my file storage / backup needs. I got 4x 640gb WDAAKS drives and an 80gb for the OS and the system is awesome. The user accounts for sharing work great, transfers to and from a fast (especially over gigabit) and the total cost of the build was just about $600 (I reused a case, dvd drive & OS HD, the rest was new from newegg)

Anyways, Home server is just another option to consider, I went with it because it can easly grow by adding any type of hard drive you want (any size, capacity, manufacture) at any time. WHS handles the "storage pool" and it grows automatically and almost instantly each time you add a new drive to it. I still have 2sata ports onboard, 2esata ports and plenty of USB (Yes, you can add external drives to the storage pool, but at a slight cost to performance)
 
I'm going to build a homebrew NAS with an old Coppermine and 2 750 gig drives in 2 or 3 months. In the interm, I'm going to take a 400 gig HDD I have laying around and back up my music, pics and personal documents with an external enclosure.
 
Danny Bui said:
A couple of things in fact:
- The computer could die and take out the drives
- A virus can fuck up the drives
- You may accidentally reformat the drives
Click to expand...

Exactly... I'm in a similar situation, and I use external drives. I do full-disk images of each of my systems once a month, and then compress the images and throw them all on external drives. Its not too time consuming, prevents all of the above problems, and means I can role back my whole system, not just recover my data.
 
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