Has anyone tried using the Mirra Personal Server products? Looks like a simple little device, but is limited in that it only does backup. You can't use it for shared music storage, for instance. And there's no disk redundancy, if it crashes it's toast.
I'd like to setup some kind of personal home network server with RAID redundancy to backup my images, centralize music storage, etc. in case my primary machine crashes. I already have redundant drives in the machine plus a 200GB outboard drive, but unless I remember to copy over my My Documents folder regularly the back ups can get stale.
What's everyone else doing to protect your valuable data?
I use a dedicated, inexpensive PC in a tower case crammed with 8 300GB drives in a RAID 5 config.
To back that up, I use an Infrant ReadyNAS with 4 x 400GB drives in it (striped, for backup only). The Infrant system is really nice -- just picked it up last week. Took 5 minutes to set it up, and it's running very nicely.
My server gets backed up daily to the ReadyNAS box.
The Infrant system looks pretty nice, I just ordered one with 4x250GB Seagates.
So why don't you RAID 5 the backup server?
thanks for the recommendation!
Marty - the backup server is only a backup. I'm not so concerned about having both systems down at once -- probability is reallllly low, and all my images are backed up on DVDs, too.
We ran a special on the infrant systems, which I posted here on Wetpixel:
Can you cancel your order and get on ours? Get in touch with my friend Adam, if you're interested. (It's a group buy)/
Ah, I see. Your primary machine is already fault tolerant. I'm going to use my ReadyNAS for additional storage within my home network for multiple pc's as well as backup for my primary machine as it's drive space is not fault tolerant.
I think I got a good deal compared to the COBA deal. I got a bare bones ReadyNAS 600 for $599 from ATACOM and 4x250GB Seagates from Monarch Computers for $109ea with free shipping.
Thanks again for the recommendation.
All the bits for the ReadyNAS arrived today. Less than 30 minutes to assemble. It's up and running, though it took almost 3 hours to initialize itself. I think it's worth the wait considering I save about $350 to put it together. It comes with some low end backup software from Genie-soft (?). I'll try that for a while until I find something better that won't break the bank. Oh, and a gigabit upgrade is on my list now too.
I would probably want to kill myself without gigabit. As it is, I spend a lot of time waiting for copying to finish.
Throughput on gigabit with a cheapie linksys switch and cheap gigabit cards is about 22-28 MB/sec, which is much better than the 8MB/s I had with 100mbps.
I bought barebones ReadyNAS, too. Piece of cake to assemble. Although -- 30 minutes? what were you doing to the thing? it's more like 5 mins.* Oh... unless you read the manual. Does it even come with one?
*(edit: I went to your website and see why it took 30 minutes, now. )
he, he. ya, 30 minutes if you stop and photograph every step
