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Backups Anonymous 05/14/13(Tue)08:16 No.33778370

Replies: >>33779452

How to do automated backups properly in a home environment?

At first I thought that I'd just slap a few HDDs in an old PC and send them images over LAN. It quickly became apparent that this was not going to work - it's way too slow, and it relies on my main PC being on.

One requirement I have is to have any kind of always-on device in a separate room, maybe 15m away from my PC. I have ~3.5TB of fairly static data in total.

A couple of solutions I've come up with so far:

Put all my platter-based HDDs in said PC (ie. make it a NAS). It does the backups on its own, meaning my main PC sees no load. Problem with this is the lack of SATA ports in it (easily solved with a cheap PCI-E SATA card), and a 1Gb/s ethernet connection may bottleneck (based on HDD specs of 110MB/s). Latency may be an issue?

Some kind of USB 3.0 based interface. 5Gb/s should be plenty, but I don't want to buy an entire system unless it's cheap and scales well to my needs.

Server equipment. I don't want to spend a whole lot here, but I was thinking there might be some old stuff I could get cheap off eBay. No idea where to even start here though. SAS?

RAID doesn't work as the drives are all of differing sizes and hardware RAID can get pricey from what I know.

Thoughts, ideas?