Offsite backups for the rest of us?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 02:10:03PM -0400, Sy wrote:
> On Apr 12, 2005 12:27 PM, Michael Galea <michaelgalea-4VtgCsEi+FIybS5Ee8rs3A at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I want to avoid using a bay, because powering down (twice) is
> annoying.  Right now I'm thinking of an external usb bay.  I saw a
> couple of nice ones here and there.. maybe I should drop by canada
> computers on my way to the meeting, and pick something up.
> 
> The *real* solution, of course, would be to have another box
> somewhere, and to have a gigabit network between the two systems, and
> to throw backups into that box.. which can be powered off without
> annoying the main box.

Yeah, so when are we going to get unlimited gigabit ethernet to our
houses?

> I just got a separate firewall going.. so I don't have a spare anymore
> (there's no way in heck I'm using my firewall as a fileserver.. heh). 
> Maybe I should pick up a $2 486?  Hmm.. I do have a 486 laying around
> which is begging to be built.  I do also have an i/o card.. I could
> pick up some drive bays and go to town on it.

Remember most 486's were limited to 512M, 2G or 8G drives.  A few have
good enough bios's to run up to 137G, but non do LBA48 (drives over 137G
need this), although I think Linux can do LBA48 in software if using PIO
mode (not DMA) although at that point your transfer rate is about 2MB/s
which would make filling a drive that big nuts in the first place.  If
the sytem takes PCI cards you may be able to run a nice new controller
card.  Of course aiming for a $100 Pentium 1/2/3 level machine may be
much more productive.

> * No gigabit though.. but then that's what intelligent synchronization is for.
> * The external usb bay is probably more travellable than the removable
> drive bay though..

Certainly more compatible with a random PC.  If your house burns down,
and you can't find that particular drive bay, well then you have to
dismantle the drive cage and put the drive in normally to access the
backup.  I guess that is OK since the restore should be the exceptional
case rather than the common case.

Lennart Sorensen
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