Daily Breakfast 486 – Peanuts
In this episode: carpooling to Atlanta; Catholic New Media Celebration Blues; Indiana Jones IV and the season finale of Lost; IP blocking and proxies; a new geek disaster; Peanuts and peanut butter; the return of Technopriest!
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Hi Fr. Roderick,
I solved my backup problems with Amazon’s fanastic and very effordable S3 service. It’s basically a service that allows saving data on their servers (either in Europe or America). The cost is $0.15 per GB storage and $0.10 per GB transfer. Here’s the web page for more information: http://www.amazon.com/S3-AWS-home-page-Money/b?ie=UTF8&node=16427261
A very comfortable program to access your Amazon S3 web backup files is JungleDisk ( http://www.jungledisk.com/ ). It costs a one time $25 license fee. This program literally maps your Amazon S3 web storage (called bucket) as a drive to your computer. JungleDisk also offers regularly scheduled backup. All data on Amazon’s S3 servers is secure due to SSL transmission and encryption. JungleDisk runs unter Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Also it comes with a USB stick version. The beauty is that where ever you are you can now access all your data – as long as you have an Internet connection.
I like it a lot and it gives me peace of mind since Amazon is a sophisticated company. Many web pages are actually running on the S3 service.
Just my 2c.
Hi Fr,
I work in a data storage company doing work with SAN fabric switches and know the importance of protecting your valuable data. I think as your data grows, you need a better data protection solution. A cheap form of doing this is through RAID protection. Eg. RAID 5 uses a min of 3 disks and which allows 1 disk to fail but your data remains safe, this is where you need to replace the failed disk and do a RAID re-build to be RAID 5 protected once again. You can cheaply either build a RAID box using linux or just buy a purpose build RAID box. I have read about the Drobo, but its seems abit pricey for what others do and its also not a NAS out of the box.
I myself own a NAS box and that offers RAID 5 data protection from a company known as Synology (I do not work with them, but its a nice product).
You can check these brands like Synology, QNAP, Iomega, Buffalo that are based on linux or HP that uses Windows Home Server.
If you are looking for more information on NAS or SAN do let me know, Id try to help you as much as I can.
Regards,
Bernard
” Its like a food terrorist attack on your system”…. Classic!
I want to second Bernard’s recommendation. You can purchase very economical RAID back up appliances now. The city I work for uses a series of devices from SonicWall that monitor each departments server and do near-instant back-ups to RAID 5 arrays. Pretty pricey, but similar devices for the home market are much more affordable.
Your hard drive debacle reminded me of the Potter Puppet Pals and their send up of Harry Potter….What is that mysterious ticking noise?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx1XIm6q4r4
Enjoy your show thanks ever so…
Blessings,
Melissa
I went through exactly the same thing as you. I purchased a 500GB Western Digital MyBook as a backup drive, and it went bad after only a few weeks. They replaced it and the new one has functioned fine for about a year now. However, it made me think exactly the same thing…, now I need a backup of my backup! So I purchased the Drobo unit and (2) 750GB drives. It has performed flawlessly so far. It was the demo video on their site that sold me – if you haven’t watched it…, you should. I was also able to get $50 off by using a promo code and it was a good tax write-off for the end of the year. Good luck with the search for a solution.
Fr. Roderick, one good option for a protected backup is a 2 drive mirrored raid 1 where there is always 2 copies of everything on 2 drives something like this:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/usb/raid_1/Gmax
If one drive ever fails you always have a mirror of it and can replace the failed drive to rebuild the mirrored raid 1.
Well, it looks like the backup issue has been pretty well covered. I want to second the RAID information, especially the comments by Michael C. We use a mirrored setup on one of our servers here at work and when one went bad, it was as simple as pulling the bad drive out, putting in a new one, and “bam”, the other drive began populating the new one.
We also have a Drobo, but have only had it for about a month. So far it seems to be working very well. We use it for staff to back up their work, mail etc.
Finally, we have about 40 or 50 “My Book” drives that we bought for individual staff to use for expansion etc. and not one has failed us so far. That is why I was surprised to hear of your failure.
Thanks for the geek news. It is one of my favorite parts of the show.
m.
Hello Fr. Roderick,
I have been an IT geek for a long time, very nice job with your geeks section. Many PC mainboards nowadays do support RAID natively, isn’t there a chance that your PC supports RAID 5? If so you would just have to set it up with 3 harddrives, and every time one harddrive goes bad, no data will be lost and you can simply exchange the damaged drive with a new one. The upside is, that you wouldnt have to buy anything, all you would need are 3 harddrives .