I?m looking for suggestions on data synchronization and redundancy. I have 2 locations.
Location 1 (my house):
1 mail server, 2 PCs and a laptop with data on them.
The mail server has a small tape drive and is being backed up to tape nightly.
Some critical data is backed up to the mail server.
The data is about 300GB of office documents, pictures and videos (I expect this to grow).
Location 2 (my parents? house):
1 PC and 1 laptop with data on them.
1 old PC being used as a backup location.
The data is about 500GB of office documents, pictures and videos (I expect this to grow).
There is a VPN connection between the 2 locations.
I would like to put a system in place that I can set and forget so to speak that will allow me to backup all data source at each location to a backup device on site. Those devices would then synchronize to each other nightly. The ability to have multiple versions of files/backups would be a good feature but not required.
Option 1:
I?m considering SAN boxes but they seem expensive for the amount of storage and I?m not sure if they will sync to each other without a third client controlling them.
I?ve been looking at a 1TB system from Buffalo.
Option 2:
Setup a server (probably an older PC) with file synchronization software. If I went with Linux I would probably use rsync. If I went with Windows I would probably use some other app like beyond compare. The downfall here seems to be that the system would be more complex and have a higher failure rate.
Option 3:
Setup a server (again probably an older PC) and setup backup software that is able to backup to disk rather than tape. I am familiar with Backup Exec but the cost is far too high for this project. Is there something cheap or free out there? The biggest advantage I see here is that the software probably could e-mail job logs so that I would know it?s working.
Option 4:
What are my other options?
I would love feedback or thoughts on any of the options. What are you doing? Is it working well? I really want this system to be reliable and don?t want to have to monitor it constantly.
Location 1 (my house):
1 mail server, 2 PCs and a laptop with data on them.
The mail server has a small tape drive and is being backed up to tape nightly.
Some critical data is backed up to the mail server.
The data is about 300GB of office documents, pictures and videos (I expect this to grow).
Location 2 (my parents? house):
1 PC and 1 laptop with data on them.
1 old PC being used as a backup location.
The data is about 500GB of office documents, pictures and videos (I expect this to grow).
There is a VPN connection between the 2 locations.
I would like to put a system in place that I can set and forget so to speak that will allow me to backup all data source at each location to a backup device on site. Those devices would then synchronize to each other nightly. The ability to have multiple versions of files/backups would be a good feature but not required.
Option 1:
I?m considering SAN boxes but they seem expensive for the amount of storage and I?m not sure if they will sync to each other without a third client controlling them.
I?ve been looking at a 1TB system from Buffalo.
Option 2:
Setup a server (probably an older PC) with file synchronization software. If I went with Linux I would probably use rsync. If I went with Windows I would probably use some other app like beyond compare. The downfall here seems to be that the system would be more complex and have a higher failure rate.
Option 3:
Setup a server (again probably an older PC) and setup backup software that is able to backup to disk rather than tape. I am familiar with Backup Exec but the cost is far too high for this project. Is there something cheap or free out there? The biggest advantage I see here is that the software probably could e-mail job logs so that I would know it?s working.
Option 4:
What are my other options?
I would love feedback or thoughts on any of the options. What are you doing? Is it working well? I really want this system to be reliable and don?t want to have to monitor it constantly.
