If it's not out of your price range:

http://drobo.com/

they used to have a really cool demo, I'm going to look for it again.

Drobo is awesome. I've been following them for over a year. They are a better solution than a farm of one-off drives. But, they are out of my price range for awhile.

What's wrong with Time Machine?

That's for local backups; for more safety, I'd just use S3.

48GB == $6/mo to store.

I will likely have 40GB more each month. I do not want to pay per GB for this. I am not sure I will ever need the raw material. But, I don't just want to throw it away.

The 48GB is the raw stuff that went into the videos from the presentations at the TC Lispers meeting.

As for Time Machine, it has no subtlety. I don't need this 48GB at my fingertips forever. It is data that belongs on a shelf rather than spinning at 7200rpm waiting for me.

I still think Time Machine is the ideal solution, in this case. A 1.5TB hard drive would store about three years of new data; two of them in RAID 1 runs you only a few hundred. Go 2x 1TB for cheaper, for two years of backup storage, plus get your actual Mac backed up for free.

After those three years, buy another couple 3TB hard drives and net yourself a few more years.

Plus, this way, it's very little work on your part - especially compared to backing up onto tapes or DVD-Rs.

You're probably right. It leaves my Linux box, my other Mac, and the Windows box a bit in the lurch. Maybe adding some NAS to the Linux box is the was to go.

this.

Or, if you're wanting something with less administration (I know I do, after a long day of fixing computers), you could get something like the HP MediaSmart servers, which support Time Machine and Windows native backups. I've got mine currently packed with a hair over 4TB of storage, and it works great.

If I had that cash, I'd probably go with a Drobo. I think I'm sold on adding two external drives to my Linux box and making a slow, 1TB Software RAID-1 with an eye toward making it a RAID-5 someday when I can afford more drives if it seems to work pretty well.

Sounds good. If you keep an eye out on Slickdeals, you can usually find hard drives for cheap pretty regularly. About a week ago, I got 2x 1.5TB hard drives for $160 with free shipping from Newegg.

http://forums.slickdeals.net/forumdisplay.php?f=9

Also keep in mind that software RAID-1 provides only redundancy, not backup, which is why I had recommended Time Machine + RAID-1, but if you're extra careful, then you'll probably be fine.

Since you're running Linux on your NAS, I'd move up to software RAID-6 in the future instead. RAID-5 is pretty lousy; slow to rebuild in the event of a drive failure, easy to break, and can't handle more than one drive failure.

Ah... I hadn't seen RAID-6 in the online doc I had been reading about mdadm.... but it does appear to support it on the version that I have.

I know that mdadm will let me make a RAID-5 with only two drives (which just degenerates to a slow RAID-1), but I don't know if it will let me do the same for RAID-6.... I will have to look into that.

And, yep... I may still Time-Machine stuff over there. I'm not sure.

*blink* You know Patrick, too?! All of my worlds are converging!

I know him through his friends underwhelm and gawm.

And... eyelid met underwhelm on LJ. He was in law school at the time... we met him (and soylentmean) at underwhelm's and gawm's apartment shortly after underwhelm moved back to Minnesota after law school. We recently ate dinner with underwhelm and gawm and soylentmean. Shortly thereafter, soylentmean noticed that we both had you on our LJ friends lists.

Edited at 2009-08-12 03:58 am (UTC)

To prevent you from becoming paranoid about people talking about you while you're not there:

http://soylentmean.livejournal.com/86335.html?thread=460607

I'd just buy a hard drive that you only spin up when you do a backup... get like a 1tb drive($99), and just do backups to that. Perhaps use TIme Machine to get the stuff onto it. (there are tools to use *any* drive on the network for time machine, rather than just the ones hosted through apple-blessed devices.)

You could go with something like Amazon S3($cheap) + Jungle Disk($20), for example, which is VERY cheap to store, but for 48 gig, you've got a lot of upload time... also Amazon charges for up/download, so that might add in to the cost.

Personally, I back up some files to other machines manually, but my source repositories and Documents folders are backed up to Amazon S3 via Jungle Disk. I think Amazon is charging me about $0.20/mo right now. well worth it for the piece of mind it gives.

personally, I'd love to throw a Drobo on a machine at home, and share that to my user machines, but I can't afford it. The thought of forever-expanding storage is nice to me. (i know it maxes at 16TB, but still...)

I've thought about using Amazon+Jungle Disk for my source code and such. I looked at it for this, but according to Jungle Disk's advertised pricing, I'd be paying $9.20/month for this 48G... and another $6.00/month starting when I add 40GB more next week.... it doesn't work for me.

Oops. the $2/month was assuming the "Workgroup" version. The home version is $20 one-time, right? But, still... $7.20/month for 48G is not fun either.


Edited at 2009-08-12 03:40 am (UTC)

I use backblaze for 5 dollars a month, no cap, for 120gbytes of data. Intial seed takes a while, but hey, 5 dollars a month. Supports mac and pc, not sure about linux.

I also back up via timemachine for fast full disk recovery.

Adamf

Backblaze looks like a good option for my general backup needs. In this case though, I am looking to back up two or three 18GB files per month. I suppose I could split(1) them into 4GB chunks so that Backblaze will take them... but that seems like a pain, too.