[lug] NAS recommendations?

[Aaron Nichols]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 9:46 AM, Jeffrey Haemer
<jeffrey.haemer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> What would you suggest?

I know this isn't very fancy - but I've always opted for simple and
avoided RAID. Given the size of disks these days and that performance
typically isn't a huge issue for me, I appreciate keeping it basic. I
have a Linux box, doesn't need to be very powerful, with two external
USB drives - typically 500gig-1TB depending on your needs. They could
be internal SATA too - but see below for the USB advantage. One is
mounted to a "storage" mount and exposed via SMB, the other stays
unmounted and gets mounted each night and I rsync to it. I then backup
the home PC's to the storage disk and it all gets backed up each
night.

I like this approach for a few reasons:
1) If I leave town, I take the backup disk with me usually. This
prevents fire/burgulary/etc from causing me major loss. This is the
USB advantage.
2) I can keep a 3rd "backup" disk offsite and rotate between the two
if I want that type of protection.
3) I can be an idiot sometimes, and if I rm -rf my storage disk, raid
doesn't happily replicate that to the other disk. Even if the backup
job runs I do not have it doing a --delete - I do that manually every
so often to cleanup.
4) If a disk fails, I replace it, rsync the data and I'm on with my life.

It's not quite as maintenance free as an appliance - but for those of
us into Linux it's pretty low effort to maintain.

Aaron