In my continuing series of lazyweb posts, I’m seeking the best and easiest backup option for my house. What I want to do and what I should do is probably two different things.
So, I’ve got my home setup on a big APS power backup, purchased a couple of 200 GB ide hard drives, and need one final component, a cheap computer with lots of storage bays. My goal is to slap these hard drives (and more in the future) into a new-old box, and start running Dirvish to backup my main desktop (workbox), my main laptop (lifebook), and my gf’s G5 (deerbox).
Is this is sane approach? Also, where is the best place to get a cheap computer. I really don’t want to have to buy one at all, and thought I would just come across some cheap/free computer over the last couple of months, but am afraid of going into Frys and other tech stores (to be honest).
(BTW: I backup my computers by syncing the home folders between them, so that they have the same good stuff. Also, I have a portable drive I’ve been backup up my home folders up to, but have been bad in not doing a full system backup…)
The other approach I’m considering is to just to do encrypted backups to my webhost, Dreamhost. I have 200Gb of storage on there, sooooo, why not just store it there past the inital burst of the first rsync 
You may want to look at the NSLU2 to use as a computer. Small and low power it can do all that you want.
http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/
john
Great! I did think about NAS drives, but didn’t realize that you could put linux on any of them…duh, of course someone has done this
Thanks!
John: That would certainly be an interesting backup device — plus, the power consumption wouldn’t make any of us eco-friendly people guilty, would it?
Jon: If you don’t have too many storage needs, you can try out Amazon S3’s storage (or your original Dreamhost idea). Plus, you would get the added benefit of an off-site solution.
Yah, thanks for the advice. I guess in the end, I want a huge box that I can just keep slapping more drives in. I think the networked/dreamhost/amazon-type service is the least headaches per dollar
Well, I wouldn’t call it cheap but here’s the system I put together:
http://bryce.homelinux.org/drupal/mythtv-backend
Total 1T fully RAID redundant storage.
As far as cheap places to find hardware, I’d once gotten an older refurbished machine through dealsdepot.com pretty cheap, esp. if you already have drives.
Offsite storage makes a lot of sense though. 200G may seem a bit tight, but Dirvish allows a fairly fine grained way of controlling what to back up.
Bryce