Good networked backup solution/storage

[tlaskows]

I just purchased WD My Cloud drive for less than 300 CAD after taxes. 4TB, plugs into your router. Just make sure you have gigabit.

Works fine for most part. This will cost you half the price of a 3TB Time Capsule and my MacBook TimeMachine can backup to it just fine. It's just really slow for some reason. I sent a note to WD to see what they say. Works with Windows too! Oh yeah, copying files from finder onto the drive is fast after forcing the Mac to use SMB 1. But time machine is still very slow.

Oh, and you can access your files from any devices. I installed the app on my Android and I can see all my files. It will also backup your stuff on your phone/PC/Mac.

I think it needs some firmware updates, but it's a promising product.

-Tom

[at0m]

don't have a home server running somewhere? git ftw, makes a great Time Machine right there. Or look into netatalk, an open Time Machine drop-in replacement.

[tlaskows]

What kind of server?

I used to have a web server running on a BeagleBone Black and I had time machine working with it.

I cannot say that it was reliable though!

It would corrupt itself once in a while...

http://www.thomaslaskowski.com/?p=468

-Tom

[jksuperstar]

Do some digging around the NET for the right FW. I know a few of my co-workers bought these, and there are some FW that are a bit faster than others. I don't know how the new OS3 works yet, but looks promising since they opened up development of apps for it to 3rd parties.

(I work at WD, but on disk drive design, not the branded products).

I use a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ with 4 drives setup as 2x RAID1 mirrors. These can be found for cheap, but they're limited to about 20MB/sec or so. But Netgear did it right a long time ago, and the thing runs linux on a SPARC processor, it does timemachine/CIFS/SMB/HTTPS/FTP/etc, and has a few hundred apps. Overall, it is fairly low power (you can spin down the disks, etc). This can sync with other services like dropbox for a second laevel of backup.

[tlaskows]

Really appreciate the advice. Very helpful. Well, 20MB/s is good enough. I was getting less than 1MB/s with TimeMachine over wireless N few meters away from the router! Total disaster. I will see how much that stuff goes for. I don't really need backups. All my important stuff like my 8 years worth of pictures are spanned across 3 macbooks and some USB drives.

Cheers!

-Tom

[tlaskows]

I'll plug a hard drive in to this and swallow sadness then send some faxes

http://www.tplink.com/ca/products/detai ... R3600.html

That's my router. I forgot that it has USB ports. Sheizer!

-Tom

[garyb]

just backup when you are asleep.
there's no need for a constant backup.

[tlaskows]

Yeah, exactly!

I fixed the glitch for free! At least 3 year old laptop hard drive that I never used (750GB) in a 3.5" USB 2.0 enclosure (really old one) connected to the router.

Time Machine does not work, but I don't need a back up of my whole drive anyway. Only the important stuff.

It's not any slower or faster than the paid version And this cost me about 0$. I don't need 12TB worth of backup. My MacBook SSD is only 256GB and only about 40GB are all the pictures (13,000 or so).

Why do I always have to make my life so complicated??

-Tom

[tlaskows]

Hmm,

Found a cheap lightly used Neatgear NAS, 2 bays. Picked up 2x2TB HDDs, probably will run them in RAID mirroring mode.

Let's hope stupid Time Machine can back up to it fine.

BTW, I'm on a dedicated 300Mbs 5GHz link to my router from my Mac. All the other laptops in the house are on the 2.4GHz which runs at 144Mbs. Speed test going to a fast server on a web hits around 130Mbits/s. So the guys at the computer store can't tell me that it's slow because it's going over the network. It just doesn't make any sense!

Oh yeah, thanks for your suggestion JK. I don't need 4 bays, those still go for a lot of money.

-Tom

[astroman]

I would use mirror-mode only for transaction critical stuff with lots of changes
and then only with proper drives (labeled for server applications)

for archive purpose it doesn't provide more safety, but rather the opposite
manegement of the raid seems to wear out drives really fast
(at least that happened with one of my Synology Disk-Stations)
I filled it with archive data and expected that it to reduce activity after some hours
but in fact that thing never did stop - day in/day out ... until one disk broke (regular WD)

cheers, Tom

[jksuperstar]

The readynas will autoconfigure the raid, unless you tell it differently. 2 disks will be RAID 1 (identical copies). Set it to spin down to save.power, especially if this is backup & archival. Then you'll save the disks life, too. The nice thing with these drives is if one goes down, AND your box dies, you can pull the drive and access data on a Linux machine (as ext3 I think). If you are really paranoid, do an occasional backup to a usb drive, and keep that in a safe place like a firebox .

Then setup ssh access with Root, and start installing plugins from the readynas site. It serves me well as a dlna server, sftp for collaboration with other artists (it serves webpages only from specific shares), and I have my phones back up pictures automatically (I use sweet home on Android).

Remember: be religious about backups, Jesus Saves.

[tlaskows]

Ahahahaha. All the important stuff it on Bitbucket and the cloud and on few laptops and USB sticks.

This is mostly for downloads and stuff. Hopefully syncing my Sonar and Scope directories automatically eventually. I am not sure yet. But I would like a backup of pictures from the Galaxy. Right now it uploads them to Google Photos. But it will run out of space eventually.

If I get lost, I know where to find you

-Tom

[tlaskows]

The readynas will autoconfigure the raid, unless you tell it differently. 2 disks will be RAID 1 (identical copies). Set it to spin down to save.power, especially if this is backup & archival. Then you'll save the disks life, too. The nice thing with these drives is if one goes down, AND your box dies, you can pull the drive and access data on a Linux machine (as ext3 I think). If you are really paranoid, do an occasional backup to a usb drive, and keep that in a safe place like a firebox .

Then setup ssh access with Root, and start installing plugins from the readynas site. It serves me well as a dlna server, sftp for collaboration with other artists (it serves webpages only from specific shares), and I have my phones back up pictures automatically (I use sweet home on Android).

Remember: be religious about backups, Jesus Saves.

I swear I thought there was an ext4 with journaling. Or is that the ext3? Is was the one IBM implemented, I think. It doesn't matter. I can just boot up a live CD and access the drive. if it lasts more than 7 years, it will be a good investment.

What I don't understand, back in the day I used to keep my computer always on and it was definitely writing to the hard drive all the time. The drives lasted for a very long time. Are today's drives less reliable?

Cheers,

-Tom

[jksuperstar]

Definitely not less reliable. And you can leave the drives up, but its worth optimizing power and life, at the cost of 5 second latency for that first access whenever drives are spun down. It is just a radio button to click, and can be changed at will.

[tlaskows]

I understand.

But in the past, my hard drives never slept, because windows just kept on doing something (probably swapping) non stop!

I don't mind if I have to wait a bit for the hard drive to wake up.

Oh yeah, OT. I spent the evening trying to get into my smart TV. Ahahaha. I can send serial command from the terminal, but it was a PITA.

-Tom

[tlaskows]

Thank you Mister JK. Got my ReadyNAS 100 today, plugged in 2x2TB in RAID-0... and the best part is that Time Machine is doing almost 10MB/s. My Cloud wasn't even able to do 1MB/s. NetGear is good gear

-Tom

[tlaskows]

Oh yeah, from Finder it's maxing up my wifi speed of 300Mbs. So it's got the power...

-Tom

[valis]

Windows and OSX will perform a variety of maintenance tasks in the background, hence you seeing constant activity (unless something was memory resident and also performing tasks too, in which case it was all of the above =] ).

I still leave spinning platters that are accessed more than a few times a day in fully powered up states, if you change states enough the electrical &a mechanical stress still affects spinning drives. In fact I almost always lose a drive (when that does happen) on either power cycle or spin up from idle.

[tlaskows]

So do you recommend to keep them spinning all the time? I did set them to sleep after 5 minutes. But my MacBook wakes them up every hour or so That's probably not good for the drives.

-Tom