which OS to use for home file server backup

[saimike]

after a recent hdd failure that wiped out a lot of impt files for me, i've begun to look at feasible backup options. NAS seems horrendously expensive -- $1000 -- so it seems that i hv 2 alternatives:

1. ext usb hdd. the downpoint is that some of my pc's at home only hv a usb1.1 controller. so backup speeds will be rather slow.

2. use the pc parts lying ard to build a 2nd "low processing power" pc for use as hdd server for file backup.

if i go with option 2, which OS would be appropriate? i'll prob power it up occasionally just to copy/ftp files onto it and shutting it down.

 

[daveshel]

Linux with SAMBA is perfect for the task.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: saimike
after a recent hdd failure that wiped out a lot of impt files for me, i've begun to look at feasible backup options. NAS seems horrendously expensive -- $1000 -- so it seems that i hv 2 alternatives:

1. ext usb hdd. the downpoint is that some of my pc's at home only hv a usb1.1 controller. so backup speeds will be rather slow.

2. use the pc parts lying ard to build a 2nd "low processing power" pc for use as hdd server for file backup.

if i go with option 2, which OS would be appropriate? i'll prob power it up occasionally just to copy/ftp files onto it and shutting it down.

A USB2 PCI card is $10 at Frys and resolves the problem nicely - no need for another Windows license, no need for another computer, no need for any more work. Or just run the backup (I assume you're using NTBACKUP) at night, and you'll never notice the speed.

 

[Relayer]

this NAS is under $300.

 

[saimike]

wow, thanks for all the input guys ...

i guess if i really wanna do it on the cheap, i can get one of those drive bay things that allows me to easily disconnect the hdd when i'm not doing any backups. ... or i could also simply open the case and plug in the hdd power when i'm doing weekly backups.

 

[trexpesto]

Originally posted by: saimike
- so it seems that i hv 2 alternatives:
.
.

Sorry about your HD. :brokenheart:
Options!:

3. RAID 1. This is the classic protection from hard drive failure. I guess you'd need a card if your mobo don't support it. Plus matching harddrive.
4. Reliable DVD Rewriter. Fun for the whole fambly! Cost maybe < $100? Look in hot deals.
5. CVS, awesome free versioning system. This would go great on the

"low processing power" pc

. Especially good for non-binary files, as it keeps only the differences between text files and so minimizes storage requirements, but also works on binary files like Word docs and images. We have this running on RedHat 8 or 9. Little bit of a learning curve, but if you are a true geek it is pie.
6. Depending on what your problem was before, you could just have another hard drive and use task scheduler to copy over.
7. Norton Ghost or something. Only used it once.

 

[drag]

I like option2.

Get a Linux install going on a cheap PC. Stick a DVD burner on it, stick a big harddrive on it. Get a UPS for it, then after you get it installed and setup stick it in the basement or a airy closet so that it is out of the way. Check it every couple months for dust build up, maybe rig a dust filter for it's intake....

Then just keep a eye for security updates, or use Yum or Apt to automate it's update. If you have to do any administration use Webmin from your desktop computer's browser, or setup a VNC server to do the same thing.

Then when you have realy important stuff then back it up to DVD and then keep it in a shoe box. Or if you have REALY important stuff back it up to several copies of DVDs and put it in a safe deposit box.

It should run perfectly fine for years with little adminstration. The UPS will keep giving it clean power and protect your data from the occasional brownout. 200-300+ day uptimes are pretty normal for this sort of thing.

Of course the hardpart is getting use to Linux if your unfamilar with it, but things like clarkconnect make it fairly easy, even though I prefer Debian stable for this sort of task. Fedora is good too, as is Suse and Debian testing.

edit:
backups are the most important thing to do for good stuff.

One thing I thought about doing is taking a 2nd harddrive, as big as the first, and then simply keeping it unplugged completely inside the computer case. Then once a month or so, take down the computer, plug in the extra harddrive and copy all the data from the first drive to the second. Then turn it off again and unplug it. Then just turn it back on.

Also if you want to use the remote disk as a local disk, linux can do PPP networking thru highspeed firewire stuff if the ethernet is a little bit to slow for you. But that, of course, requires a bit more knowledge...

 

[saimike]

Originally posted by: drag
One thing I thought about doing is taking a 2nd harddrive, as big as the first, and then simply keeping it unplugged completely inside the computer case. Then once a month or so, take down the computer, plug in the extra harddrive and copy all the data from the first drive to the second. Then turn it off again and unplug it. Then just turn it back on.

i thought about that too ...

 

[Czar]

Get a cheapo/free computer, put a large hd in, attach it to the network. Install Windows, install Second Copy 2000 or whatever the latest version is called and configure it

Automaticly does incrimental backups and keeps backup of deleted files, greeeeat program

 

[SeTeS]

I use both solutions... I have an "old" p2-450 box running as a server, but also use a external usb drive for an additional backup of that.

I wouldn't place my faith in a usb only solution -unless- it was NOT constantly attached to the system. The usb drive is just as vulnerable to damage by virus or user error as any local hd.

Czar's mention of Second Copy would work. I used that for a while before switching to a program called SecurDat. Works great for me.

If you've got a LOAD of data to backup, you might think of picking up a removable drive/tray setup. They can be had for fairly cheap and will save you a lot of time over a usb/firewire solution. For instance, use the IDE tray to do your full backups, then use usb/firewire for incrementals.

Either way, try to keep at least one backup OFFLINE.

 

[redbeard1]

A friend showed me this and it seems pretty slick. It makes a bootable floppy that creates a basic samba server. From there you telnet into it to set the drives up. You use a web browser to get at your files. For the moment though, you need to make the floppy in a linux enviroment, as you need to use dd to create the floppy from the image. Or you can order it from them.

NASlite

 

[spyordie007]

A USB2 PCI card is $10 at Frys and resolves the problem nicely - no need for another Windows license, no need for another computer, no need for any more work. Or just run the backup (I assume you're using NTBACKUP) at night, and you'll never notice the speed.

I'm surprised this along with an external enclosure is getting overlooked. This would be both inexpensive and convienient (I would consider taking the system down just to plug in an internal hard drive inconvinient).
The DVD option is okay but requires a bit more human intervention (copying dumped backupfiles to disc manually).

If you go the extra computer route there are plenty of options as well (windows, linux, etc.) since the system requirements for a file server that gets used this little are very low.

 

[saimike]

hey guys, i dont hv a ton of stuff to backup since i lost a ton of stuff when my hdd crapped out recently (think the read/write heads r toast). however a scalable solution would be great ... i'm leaning towards usb ext drive or the hdd tray. in anycase, this drive will be offline when i'm backing it up.

 

[drag]

The most scalable is the Linux solution, I beleive.

Which, obviously, is my favorite.

Get the cheapest CPU you can find, any AMD or Intel is fine quality, and a nice quality motherboard. No frills though, you don't need extra stuff like Raid 0/1 or any crap like that.

Maybe Intel would be better because they support throttling back when they overheat, so that if you fan fails or whatnot your computer won't fry itself to death. Stick in a decent tower and on a high quality UPS to isolate it from power spikes, brownouts, and gracefully shutdown if you have a full blackout.

Right off the bat you can just use 1 drive.

However modern Linux has support for a thing called LVM. Instead of being restricted to the old school partition setup you can do things like actively resize partitions.

So say you set up a 100gig LVM partition... and say you run out of room. So you go out and buy a second harddrive, well you can then just add the second harddrive to the partition. So that physically you have 2 100gigs, but logically you have 1 200 gig partition.

Now that's not that usefull, because if the your old drive crashes and burns then the data on both is probably going to be trashed. But that's just one aspect to LVM.

Here is were the nice scalability comes in:

Software RAID.

Say you buy a single 250 harddrive now they are kinda of expensive, but they, like everything else, will be dirt cheap eventrually. So hopefully by the time you fill that drive up you can afford to get 4 more harddrives of the same size and a IDE to PCI adapter.

You setup those 4 more harddrives in a Raid 5 and use your old harddrive as the "hotswappable" (although with normal PATA this isn't realy possible, but that's the term I know best to explain it). So that if one of your harddrive fails, then that 5th drive kicks in automaticly to take over.

That way you end up with redundancy.

So that is scalable. Get one 250gig now while you can afford it, then when the prices fall or you need more space then you have up to a terrabyte of scalability (or much more if you want to spend it.)

It's definately more work (you'd have to learn how to use Linux and set all this crap up.), and it's more expensive (a cheapo PC + UPS vs one external harddrive).

But ultimately it will be worth it if you plan on having tons and tons of crap to save up. Plus Linux's software RAID is suppose to be very fast. A 1.5Ghz CPU is much much more capable at calculating file transfers then the 200 or 400mhz cpu's you get with the nicer hardware RAID setups.

(plus having a second computer is nice because you can do stuff like do backups to DVDs or use the CPU to compress files and such without monopolizing your desktop computer. )

overview of Linux LVM on software RAID

 

[Concillian]

I personally use a RAID 5 array in Linux for my personal backup, and an external HD offsite every 6 months.

I think you overlooked option 1b)
Buy a cheap USB2.0 or Firewire card to use to connect an external HD.

That would certainly be the cheapest and easiest solution.

 

[saimike]

erm, i think u guys r scaling too high for me ... my needs r simple 🙂 i just need an easy way to backup files from my desktop/laptop to a hdd somewhere else. its nice to know the ceiling is high tho'!

for now, i'm leaning towards a linux box since i have enough parts lying ard to make a 2nd pc (save the monitor). so thats cheaper than buying a pci usb2.0 card and external hdd with box. which distro would be good for this? do i hv to ftp or can i use windows explorer? r there file syncing software out there for windows desktop/laptop and linux backup servers?

 

[drag]

Debian stable makes a good file server, but it's out of date. I use debian unstable for a desktop and that would make a great server, not quite production quality maybe.

But that's more for advanced users. Newbies can handle Debian without much trouble but you have to have lots of patience.

Any distro can make a great server. My next choice would be Fedora. Fedora Core 2 probably.

This is because like Debian, Fedora has excelent support for stuff like Apt and Yum.

Apt and Yum are two tools that do similar things. These are advanced package handlers that you sync up with ftp servers full of RPM/Deb packages. RPM for Redhat/Fedora/Mandrake/Suse and Debs for Debian. These are packages that contain programs and stuff and are custom designed for each distro to install software on it.

Now with Apt for instance a typical session will go like this, say you go to here and read thru all this stuff and know what is going on with it and you installed it by downloading the RPM and go rpm -i apt-blahbalbhablah at the command line

Then you go:

su
(you do that to become Super User, basicly "root" so now that command line has administrative privilages.
apt-get mirror-select
(that goes thru steps to help you setup a mirror to use for your downloads)
apt-get update
(that updates your package records)
apt-get upgrade
(this upgrades your OS to include all the newest packages, security patches, and bugfixes.)
apt-get install programname
(this searchs for a program, if it finds it and it's not already installed then it goes to the server and calculates the dependances and what other packages you need in order to get it to work properly. Then it downloads the RPM's and the dependance RPMs. It asks you if you realy want to install it, and you say yes and then it installs it)


Otherwise Suse or Mandrake make great setups. People find these a bit more userfriendly the Debian and a bit bettter default setups then Fedora, but they lack the well supported online repositories that Fedora and especially Debian have (debian has like 10,000+ programs aviable for free and Free downloads)


For file transfering with Windows machine you have several options. The best is going to be SAMBA.

SAMBA is Linux's version of Window's file and print server. These use the SMB protocol.

Otherwise their are lots of different FTP servers and webservers such as Apache and hundreds of other options you can use. But with Windows your choices are limited.


For remote administration you have several options, so you can aviod wasting a keyboard, mouse and monitor on a standalone file server.
1. SSH server.

This is a secure shell server and is very usefull for remote administration. It's mainly used for command line work, and Windows has the excellent Putty.exe client that you can install. It's also one of the few choices that are almost absolutely safe to use over the internet since it has a very strong encryption sceme. Stuff like telnet and ftp have NO encryption sceme and thus are not safe except for anonymous use.

It is very flexible. If your running a OS that supports X windows, such as one of the BSDs, Linux, or OS X (with add ons) you can run GUI apps thru it like they were native to your desktop..

It can also tunnel other protocols thru SSH. I've used it for setting encrypted PPP (like modem PPP stuff) tunnels thru the internet for safe use of things like FTP, X, and telnet.

Of course you can't do this in Windows, but with Putty.exe you still have one kick-@ss command line setup.

2. VNC.

VNC is nice to use with Unix to Windows for remote administration. That way you have a GUI Linux desktop in a window on your Windows desktop. Unlike going from Windows to Windows and since X windows is truly multiuser, you create a entirely new desktop for each VNC server you run on your linux box.

Although it will take some setup to get GNOME or KDE to run over it. I think by default it uses a ugly, but servicable, ancient X window manager that comes with default every X windows thing in existance, since the 80's. or something like that.


3. Webmin.

A nice web-based GUI configuration tool, I beleive that Mandrake has by default. A simple HTTP server provides remote administrative capabilities for a bunch of services, including SAMBA, thru plugins. You will have to edit a config file to allow other machines on your LAN to be able to log in. Uses SSL for encryption/protection.


Going from Windows to Linux can be painfull sometimes. They are 2 entirely different enviroments that only resemble each other on a superficial level. If setting this stuff up is overwealming their are specific purpose distros that are pre-configured to make things like this easy.

There are many, probably dozens. One option is clark connect. They have a full featured commercial version and a realy close free version. I've never used it but it seems simple to setup. But their are others.

Usually somebody new to Linux will have to install a few different Distros and whatnot till they settle on one that is most comfortable for them. What one Linux distro can do, all can do. It's just that each has a different personality and a slightly different target audiance.

Check out the linux document project.

See the guides especially. Check out the bash beginners guide, the advanced scripting guide if your up to it, and finally the Linux administrators guide. Hopefully they will give a decent overview on how the system is setup, and these are Linux distro-nuetral so anything you learn will be applicable to most Linux stuff and even to a lot of Unix and unix variants stuff, too.

there are a lots of howtos for specific tasks that are nice, and also google is your friend.

google even has a Linux specific search

Unix begot the Internet, the internet begot Linux. However most of the usefull documentation stayed on the internet. Also good bookstores have bunches of Linux books ranging from increadably crappy to increadably usefull.

edit:
(plus once you get Linux setup you can do cool things like use VideoLan Server, and Icecast. (you can use VideoLan Client in Windows, but not the server version. And you can use Icecast from Windows, too. (both ways), however if your going to be storing your MP3's on a remote server, you might as well remote stream, too! Also if you have the bandwidth and a computer, and a boss that doesn't mind you can stream music from your home to work and stuff like that if you want. Can't do that from a NAS or a USB harddrive.)

 

[n0cmonkey]

DVD burner is probably one of the easiest. Just make sure to verify the disk after you've burned it. You can even build the other machine, stick the DVD burner in it, copy all your files to it, and burn them. You end up with 3 copies in various forms: DVD in case of an "oh shoot!" type of problem (major power surge killing all electronics in the house), "darn!" (accidentally deleting something), "oops!" (over writing something 😱), and "Stupid IBM!" (single hard drive failure).

 

[Concillian]

Originally posted by: saimike
erm, i think u guys r scaling too high for me ... my needs r simple 🙂 i just need an easy way to backup files from my desktop/laptop to a hdd somewhere else. its nice to know the ceiling is high tho'!

Originally posted by: Concillian
I think you overlooked option 1b)
Buy a cheap USB2.0 or Firewire card to use to connect an external HD.

That would certainly be the cheapest and easiest solution.

 

[drag]

I think you overlooked option 1b)
Buy a cheap USB2.0 or Firewire card to use to connect an external HD.

That would certainly be the cheapest and easiest solution.

Yes yes. Almost everybody here, including me, mentioned just using a extra or external drive for backup.

But it's nice to have a extra fileserver anyways, and he already has the parts to build it laying around...

Trouble with a external harddrive is that 1: it's laying around just waiting to be knocked of off tables and such. And 2: once you get used to saving large amounts of stuff, you'll eventually use up what space you have and want more.

 

[DasMan2]

Great ideas on options to small server needs ...

Drag did put in some amount of input . .. wow.

IS a AMD K6-2 450 in a Asus TXP4 M.B.(430TX chipset) with 128 megs of ram good for these server types?
Bios allows for 128 gig hard drive usage.

Any limitations there?

Not to steal away from this original posting request..

 

[tiap]

A really simple and cheap solution is to use removeable drive trays. I have 7 hdrives set as master on an additional promise card with a couple of these being 6 years old. Just shut down to add/remove them and copy data to them. If the data is really important I write it to dvd as well. I also use removeable tray for the main OS hdrive. The neat thing about that is that my 4 year old daughter has her own hdrive with the OS and when she plays her learning games like Hello Kitty, it's like a separate computer for her.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: DasMan2
Great ideas on options to small server needs ...

Drag did put in some amount of input . .. wow.

IS a AMD K6-2 450 in a Asus TXP4 M.B.(430TX chipset) with 128 megs of ram good for these server types?
Bios allows for 128 gig hard drive usage.

Any limitations there?

Not to steal away from this original posting request..

Something like that should do alright; you can always get a cheap PCI IDE controller too if you want to get a bigger drive than the motherboard can support.