[Pesqueeb]

Thinking about going with some sort of home network/cloud type setup for the family at home. I recognize that I'm probably looking at starting from scratch if I do this. Used to be a gamer but life and a kid have seen those days go bye-bye so I'm fairly well behind on what the current or near future technologies look like. We do a fair amount of traveling so what I'm thinking about doing is going to some sort of dual laptop or laptop/tablet combo, one each for the wife and myself, plus either turning the old home computer into a storage/network center for all of the kid photos and wifes quicken or buying some sort of gizmo like the WD cloud storage interface. Of primary importance for me is 1. Backup, ALL of my daughters pictures are digital, I must have RAID or some other backup in case a drive shells out. I will (and do) also keep a hard copy on an external at work 2. Networking, if we go to all portable devices I would like to be able to use them anywhere in the house, plus we use the Wii for teh netflix and I do still play the 360 from time to time. 3. Now that the kid is old enough and her passport just recently arrived, I need at least one portable device so that when we're traveling I can check flights on teh fly (since were non-rev standbying) and pull up various travel sights in case we wind up at a destination that might not have been our intended target.

Thoughts and/or suggestions? Is this feasible?

 

[binary visions]

You want to do the server/backup stuff cheaply?

How much data are you looking at backing up?

 

[bean]

In addition to BV's questions, how are you organizing your photos? Are they just sitting in directories, or are you using something like Picasa, iPhoto or Light Room? What's your internet connection like?

I used to have a similar set up. There was my main computer which was a desktop machine, a laptop each for my wife and me, and a media computer in the living room that was connected to the TV. All data lived on my desktop - music, photos, videos, everything. I used Windows Live Mesh to sync data from various directories on that machine with directories on our laptops (I chose this because it's Mac and PC compatible and we have Apple laptops while my main computer was running Windows). So if one our laptops had been lost, stolen or damaged, it was easy to stop the sync with the old machine and set up the folder on a new one. The media computer connected to some network shares because there was no need for actual sync on it. The main machine was backed up in three ways. First a continuous backup was done to one drive using Acronis. Second I did a manual backup once a week to the other drive using Microsoft Sync Toy or . Finally, in case things went badly, badly wrong, I also did online backups using Backblaze (super easy to use, and restorations are available by external hard drive so you don't have to download everything). It all worked pretty well.

 

[Pesqueeb]

You want to do the server/backup stuff cheaply?

How much data are you looking at backing up?

I clearly don't need leading edge or business type stuff but I'm willing to spend some cash if it means bang for buck performance. I'd say at this point my wife is I'm looking to spend no more than 3 grand, the less spendy the better of course. To give you an idea at data storage, my "offsite backup" consists of a 500 GB external drive I keep in my tool box in the hangar. It's about 85% full as of last months backup.

In addition to BV's questions, how are you organizing your photos? Are they just sitting in directories, or are you using something like Picasa, iPhoto or Light Room? What's your internet connection like?

I used to have a similar set up. There was my main computer which was a desktop machine, a laptop each for my wife and me, and a media computer in the living room that was connected to the TV. All data lived on my desktop - music, photos, videos, everything. I used Windows Live Mesh to sync data from various directories on that machine with directories on our laptops (I chose this because it's Mac and PC compatible and we have Apple laptops while my main computer was running Windows). So if one our laptops had been lost, stolen or damaged, it was easy to stop the sync with the old machine and set up the folder on a new one. The media computer connected to some network shares because there was no need for actual sync on it. The main machine was backed up in three ways. First a continuous backup was done to one drive using Acronis. Second I did a manual backup once a week to the other drive using Microsoft Sync Toy or . Finally, in case things went badly, badly wrong, I also did online backups using Backblaze (super easy to use, and restorations are available by external hard drive so you don't have to download everything). It all worked pretty well.

The photos just go into labeled directories, i.e. "Carissas 4th birthday" or "Alaska Cruise". We have Comcast Cable and it seems to work just fine even at peak hours even while web browsing and netflixing a movie. I would certianly be due for a router upgrade. Due to the nature at which my current computer and backup procedures evolved, my routine consists of backing up Pictures and Quicken to a secondary once a week or so, then once a month I bring home the "offsite" drive and run windows backup with it. My music backups consist of the iPods themselves as it's fairly easy to recover lost files directly from them, as I had to do recently when my secondary drive (which is the sole home of my iTunes files) went Tango Uniform.

 

[binary visions]

Here's what I would do (cheap version):

- Buy a couple 3TB drives and stuff them into the desktop. No RAID.

- Schedule a backup utility like Microsoft Sync Toy to run, on the desktop, once or twice a day and pull data off of your laptops for backup. The reason I like to pull from the laptops instead of push to the server, is that it's invisible to the laptops. It's what I do at home. It also means that all of your sync logs and stuff are stored in one place - one thing to check.

- Schedule a nightly disk-to-disk backup using the same utility (again, for the sake of consolidating logs). Don't use RAID for this, just schedule a nightly sync from one disk to another.

- Subscribe to a service like Backblaze, which I use, and install it on the desktop. There are other services if you don't want to use Backblaze; the point is just to have one of these online backup services that automatically backs up all of your data.

Thus, with the preceeding, you have an at-home backup of all of your data, across two disks, and you also have an off-site backup of all of your data. Frankly, I think backup onto a USB drive and carrying it off-site sucks. Either it's done infrequently enough that you can lose a week or two weeks or a month worth of data, or the drive spends enough time at home that it's at risk to disappear with everything else during a disaster.

Plus, you have just one place to check logs.

The server can also be a media source for the house, like streaming movies or music.

For tablets, backups are generally stored in the cloud. On Android, you can choose the service you want for backups - built-in is the choice to sync all photos to a private Picasa folder, or you can use Dropbox, or whatever third party app you want. For Apple, you can use iCloud.

If I had a bunch of money to throw at this, I'd consider getting a NAS that has integration with one of the online backup services. That'd consume less power than the desktop.

 

[Pesqueeb]

If I had a bunch of money to throw at this, I'd consider getting a NAS that has integration with one of the online backup services. That'd consume less power than the desktop.

I think this is what I'd like to do. If our home desktop is going the way of the dino and were running multiple laptops and/or tablets, I see no real reason to keep or maintain the home desktop, especially given that I'm not gaming any more. Wife can do quicken on a laptop, back it up to the NAS, and we can store the pictures there too. I'll buy a bigger external HDD when needed to keep in the hangar and continue the monthly back up to it. Yea, if the house burns down we might lose a month of pictures and finical data, but it's better than losing all of it. Right now I'm leaning towards the NAS, a nice(er) laptop, and either a cheaper laptop or a nice tablet, plus a new wireless router.

Hardware suggestions? Not an apple fanboi, but not opposed either generally speaking.

 

[SkaredShtles]

As usual BV has intelligent suggestions.

Are the internet "cloud" backup providers getting cheap enough that I might consider one? It would be nice not to have to "offsite" my $hit manually...

 

[Pesqueeb]

As usual BV has intelligent suggestions.

Are the internet "cloud" backup providers getting cheap enough that I might consider one? It would be nice not to have to "offsite" my $hit manually...

He IS the voice of reason after all......

If you have gigantic amounts of data I can see how a manual offsite backup would be a pain in teh dick, but for me it takes maybe an hour or two. I can't justify a monthly expense of cloud storage when I can back up most of my files to an external HDD during dinner.

 

[Quo Fan]

Here's what I would do (cheap version):

- Buy a couple 3TB drives and stuff them into the desktop. No RAID.

Why no RAID? Just curious.

 

[binary visions]

Say it with me now, 'sqeeb:

Always synchronized, online backup.

Seriously, we're talking about $5/month for unlimited data. Backblaze will even ship you your data on a drive if you don't want to wait for the download after a disaster.

I know you think it's no big deal to lose a month worth of data. That's right up until that month includes, oh, your daughter riding her first horse or something. Not to mention the dread that you might feel when you plug in the drive after a disaster, and you hear it go "click. click. click."

$60/year is such peace of mind.

For hardware, the iPads are nice and definitely have the best selection of apps. I'm pretty enamored of my new Nexus 7, though. I think the form factor is tremendously nice - a 10" device is not portable enough for me. My girlfriend has an iPad because the quality of the pilot navigation apps is so much higher on the iPad. The particular app categories that tend to be better on the iPad, though, don't really matter to me - for me, the tablet is a media/internet consumption device more than anything.

Oh, and I use my tablet a ton at work - I have a USB to serial adapter and a terminal app on the Nexus. I can serial into all of my network devices without lugging my laptop around.

If you need new laptops, the Samsung Series 9 13" looks pretty sweet, as does the new Lenovo X1 Carbon. I've had my eye on both of them.

 

[syadasti]

A free option that helps a little - you can sync 20000 songs on google play for free via an app on your desktop (Windows, OSX, etc) - I uploaded my collection of about 10000. You can then stream your music collection anywhere:

https://play.google.com/music

I agree about the Nexus 7 - I picked up a 16GB about two weeks ago and its unbeatable (and the $199 8GB should be great for most people with good internet connections). The Apple knock-off won't be as versatile if its like the regular wifi iPads as they have no built-in GPS...

 

[binary visions]

Why no RAID? Just curious.

RAID has a number of downsides.

Keep in mind, its purpose is high availability. As such, it is at its best when you get notifications of drive failures, and can hot swap them immediately for recovery.

The downsides are:
- it eats into the write performance of the drives, especially for home machines
- the majority of the time, you don't actually need all of the data backed up. Most home users don't need their Windows directory replicated, for instance. A reinstall is no big deal. So you are wasting drive space.
- Rebuilds across dissimilar hardware can be tricky and aren't 100% reliable. If your motherboard fails, you a) need to buy a new motherboard that supports RAID and b) now need to cross your fingers that the new controller likes your array.
- You have no opportunity to stop data corruption or a virus from replicating to all drives if it happens. At least with a nightly mirror, you have the potential to see if something is wrong and prevent it. Or, if you keep multiple backup versions, to revert to a previous one.

For all of this, you gain very little as a home user vs. just replicating the data. A system problem (electrical, fire, flood) still wipes out all of your drives.

It's not that it's bad, it's just that there is very little to be gained from it.

 

[syadasti]

I would say if you use sync toy or a script another option with the two 3TB drives as suggested above I would instead put one in one machine and another in another computer on the network. You can then sync to the backup 3TB internal drive so if one HDD fails in the machine you still have a backup, also sync to a network share 3TB drive on the other in case the primary machine dies (and use wake-on-lan if you want to get fancy and save power), and then use backblaze or whatever as the off-site storage if all your computers locally die (and hopefully they have data centers in various areas of the country if you want to get carried away with it).

 

[Quo Fan]

RAID has a number of downsides.

Keep in mind, its purpose is high availability. As such, it is at its best when you get notifications of drive failures, and can hot swap them immediately for recovery.

The downsides are:
- it eats into the write performance of the drives, especially for home machines
- the majority of the time, you don't actually need all of the data backed up. Most home users don't need their Windows directory replicated, for instance. A reinstall is no big deal. So you are wasting drive space.
- Rebuilds across dissimilar hardware can be tricky and aren't 100% reliable. If your motherboard fails, you a) need to buy a new motherboard that supports RAID and b) now need to cross your fingers that the new controller likes your array.
- You have no opportunity to stop data corruption or a virus from replicating to all drives if it happens. At least with a nightly mirror, you have the potential to see if something is wrong and prevent it. Or, if you keep multiple backup versions, to revert to a previous one.

For all of this, you gain very little as a home user vs. just replicating the data. A system problem (electrical, fire, flood) still wipes out all of your drives.

It's not that it's bad, it's just that there is very little to be gained from it.

Thanks for the info.

 

[Pesqueeb]

Well, I'm typing this sh*t on a new computer. Ironically, I got home this am at 2, surfed teh web and drank a beer for about 15 minutes, and when I got up around 0930, confuser was struggling. Was rebooting every 15-10 minutes under load, then finally went into a infinite loop reboot. When I pulled the box out of the desk I noticed the north bridge fan was seized and it couldn't get past bios on start up. Thought about it for a bit and said eff-it, lets go buy some new sh*t. Decided just to get a mid priced tower at Costco just to act as household server and go the route BV suggested. Currently under the process of getting stuff off my "offsite" HDD and as soon as everything is stable, I'm going to try slaving in the old HDD's as backups and see if I can recover quicken. If that goes as I hope, the two HDD's will get wiped and I'll start them over as the new backups/iTunes library for the new computer.

 

[canadmos]

Binary Visions, you seem to have more enthusiasm about this than my profs at school. And this is the exact type of stuff I am studying.

 

[zdubyadubya]

I have almost the exact setup that BV described and recommend it to anyone/everyone. macbook pro with itunes and iphoto libraries stored on 3T NAS. NAS and macbook's SSD backed up nightly to another HDD that is mirrored to a 2nd HDD. and then... Another HUGE vote for backblaze to get an "offsite" backup. Although the initial 78 day! backup (on FIOS 50/20 btw) to backblaze was kinda a pain...

 

[SkaredShtles]

I have almost the exact setup that BV described and recommend it to anyone/everyone. macbook pro with itunes and iphoto libraries stored on 3T NAS. NAS and macbook's SSD backed up nightly to another HDD that is mirrored to a 2nd HDD. and then... Another HUGE vote for backblaze to get an "offsite" backup. Although the initial 78 day! backup (on FIOS 50/20 btw) to backblaze was kinda a pain...

How much data was that in the initial seed?

 

[bean]

How much data was that in the initial seed?

A couple years ago, my first backup with Backblaze of 450 GB took right around a month on Comcast 5/15. For what it's worth, that was about fifteen days faster for a larger amount of data than when I had previously uploaded to Mozy on the same connection.

 

[zdubyadubya]

How much data was that in the initial seed?

2.6ish TB. My itunes movie/tv show library is fairly big these days... thinking of slimming it down. But with the content providers continually getting more and more stingy about putting their stuff up on netflix/hulu/amazon prime, I have begun hoarding my media.

 

[binary visions]

The new Amazon Glacier storage looks nice. Geographically distributed, the reliability of Amazon, and you can mail them a hard drive for the initial sync.