With two freelancers in one house, I think about my backup system a lot more than when I was just gaming. With my computer meltdown Friday (intermittently bad power supply), I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit.

The basic requirements for a backup system are:

1. Recent backup. When your hard drive explodes, you want the most recent data you were working on.
2. Incremental backup. For accidental deletions, file corruption, viruses, and so on. I’ve been tossing out versions older than a month.
3. Hard drive image backup. If you’re serious about getting up and running without a day or so spent installing Windows, then the latest updates, then Visual Studio, vim, SharpReader, preferences, and on and on, you want to be able to just turn a new hard drive into an identical copy of the one that just exploded.
4. Expandable. As you generate more and more data, you need more and more safe storage. This doesn’t necessarily mean it all has to be instantly accessible, if you can come up with a safe way to archive older projects. I haven’t found an offline archival solution that’s both inexpensive and reliable. The rate at which we’ve been generating content hasn’t exceeded the rate at which hard drives become larger, so we’ve just added storage to our backup system.
5. Remote location. Fire, quake, flood, thieves, whatever: if your data’s critical, you need a copy far, far away.
6. Validated. You want to know that the data has been backed up, and that the backup is correct.

When I last took a serious look at backup solutions about two years ago, there weren’t a lot of inexpensive options that fulfilled the above requirements. Tape backup was (and still is) far too costly. At the time, Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices were either prohibitively expensive, or too flimsy for business data.

I ended up with a basic home-grown system: inexpensive PC, plus a few giant drives. It’s NAS on a budget. The backup drives are RAID 1, for a little bit of extra reliability. Software does nightly backups and keeps diffs for 30 days. I didn’t actually get enough storage to back up images of both main computers, so it fulfills requirements 1, 2, and 4. It completely falls down on #5. I haven’t configured it to send me e-mail every time it backs up, so it also falls down on #6– if it were to stop running backups, I wouldn’t know until a few days later when I checked on it.

I’ve been doing some research on upgrading the system, and it looks like personal NAS has become a lot better and a lot cheaper. These reviews from 2005 suggest that the Buffalo TeraStation and Infrant ReadyNAS are solid entries. I particularly like the strategy of buying an empty NAS and adding my own SATA drives.

On the other hand, what will the NAS do for me? I’ll probably get better performance, and lower power usage. They handle printer and USB drive sharing as well, though I’m happy with my printer sharing solution for now. I’ll probably gain in the validation department (automated e-mails about backup activity, RAID drive failure, etc.), but I could probably just reconfigure my current software for the same gain. I still won’t have a remote location, so that remains a large point of failure.

The remote location front doesn’t look too promising. Tapes are out of the question. Online backups are rather pricey, even if only used for my most critical data.

For now, I think I’m just going to reconfigure my current “budget NAS”, and maybe add a couple larger drives so I can get hard drive images going. It’s the cheapest solution that comes close to my goals, as long as I accept that I’m screwed when my house burns down. At least I’ll still have all my gmail.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 1st, 2006 at 8:57 pm and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.