[ale] NAS: any ideas

[Bjorn Dittmer-Roche]

On Sat, 28 Aug 2004, Brandon Colbert wrote:

> The company I do work for is looking to setup offsite storage; I was think 
> about setting up a NAS device to backup the backup. This will allow the owner 
> to bring the NAS device in plug it into a ethernet jack and backup the data. 
> When the backup is complete he will be able to take the NAS device home or I 
> could set the NAS to backup over the VPN to an offsite location.
>
> Do anybody have any good ideas?
>
> What is the best inexpensive NAS device. Has anybody played with the Linux on 
> the NSLU2 project.

I think the suggestion of using a network based solution is best, and it's 
how most offsite backup services will work. I don't see the need for the 
extra staging unless you want to have local backups as well, in which case 
you might want to look into something other than NAS. eg. If you are just 
looking to have local/easy access to recent data, because you don't want 
to wait for or pay your offsite folks lots of money when a user 
accidentally deletes a file, you might want to look into file system 
snapshots on FreeBSD 5:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/snapshots.html

I've set this up and it works well. I imagine Linux offers something like 
this too, maybe with one of the less common file systems. Of course it is 
probably too much to ask to switch the file systems/OS on your server, but 
it's a thought anyway....

good luck!

 	bjorn