Dave's Space

For a while now the main home PC has been an AMD 4400 box w/2Gb and about 800 MB of disk.  This is the machine the kids use and the one on which all of our family photos and music is stored.  I'm pretty good with managing the security on the machine and have the photos and music set up so that anybody can read them or add to the collection but nobody (except me) can change or delete anything.  But still, the lack of backups really bugged me.  What if Vista ran amok?  What if the kids did something I'd not thought of???

A few weeks back I went out and bought a new 500 MB HD to serve as the backup drive for the rig.  The idea was that I would use Vista's backup software to regularly backup the machine.  After installing the disk and playing w/Backup, the plan became unworkable for the following reasons:

1. Vista's backup utility absolutely SUCKS!!!!!  One of the things that really make me nuts about MSFT is that we release (or let escape) really cool stuff but we forget the basics.  Not only is Vista Backup awesomely slow, it does not allow me to choose the directories I'm interested in backing up.  You can only do backups drive by drive.  This is absolutely ridiculous.  Especially when it seems obvious that people only consider a subset of their data as being critical and worthy of spending extra $$$ on to maintain more storage.
2. My backups need to be on another machine (ideally in another place which I'll get to later) and that machine needs to me locked down hard so that nobody in the house can mess with it.

OK, so now we have basic requirements: Be able to select dirs to backup and backup to another machine.

Step one: Get a new machine.

I took a page from Brian's playbook and opted to go cheap. After all, this is a file server, not a game machine. All it needs is a bunch of disks, a CPU and some memory. A trip to Fry's brought me home with:

1. Motherboard: ECS 945P-A                  $29.90
2. Processor: Intel Pentium D 805           $49.00
   2.7 GHz
3. CPU Fan: X-Dream 775                      $17.99
4. Memory: 2xKingston 4200, 533MHz     $69.98 for both
   DDR2 1GB sticks
5. Case: Raidmax Ares w/450W PS         $69.99
   I went a bit beefier here because of
   the PS and the fact that the case
   holds 10 drives.

So let's stop here for a sec and do some math. I just put together a dual core, 2GB mem system for $236.86. Pretty darn good!!! To this I add:

1. DVD Writer: Emprex 18X DVDR        $39.99 - $15 mail in rebate
2. Storage: 3xSeagate 500 GB             $109.99 each on sale
   SATA drives

Step 2: What to do about backup???

Initially I had 2 choices (not counting the sole sucking Vista backup):

1. Find something on GigaNews that did what I liked then buy it, or
2. Write my own.

There is no dearth of backup solutions available on GN. Some seem pretty good but none of the couple I tried did exactly what I wanted (i.e. Select dirs, schedule full and incremental, variable retention period, non proprietary data format).

Next choice, build my own. I thought about this for a while and it was gonna be great. An NT service that did everything I wanted. A nice GUI to set up backup policy and restores. The ability to restore any directory to exactly how it existed just before any given backup. An elegant use of SQL Express to store backup meta data. All in all, it would have been a fun project. An exchange with Farookh pointed me at Windows Home Server. This is a really nice product. Its a little rough around the edges but it is a fantastic start. Well done WHS team. So, what does it give me?

1. A basic server O/S. In this case: Windows Small Business Server 2003 (a SKU of the main Server 2003 line).
2. The ability to add disks galore and to have them all present themselves as the same network share (i.e. all the disks look like a single disk).
3. The ability, on a share folder by folder basis, to "distribute" files. That is, the content of the folder exists on 2 physical disks. If a disk dies, you still have your data. This is kind of like RAID but works on bog standard NTFS volumes. Generally if you RAID controller dies, you're hosed as RAID controllers write data in proprietary formats.
4. The ability to schedule regular backups on all the families' computers. The backup technology is VERY spooky. My data is largely uncompressible photos, music, Zips and RARs. When WHS backed up my data the size of the resultant data was more than ½ as small as what it had been originally. How can this be? Enter Single Instance Storage which seems to have been ripped off from Storage Server.
5. The ability to exclude directories from the backup tree.

So there we have it. I now have a 2TB low end server with just about every feature I could imagine. All for just under $700.

Nest Step: True Offsite Backup

There is a WHS Add-In that will facilitate offsite backup to Amazon's S3 service. The cost is crazy high though ($0.15/GB/mo). So, I'm going to buy 1 TB of disk and install it on one of Brian's storage bricks with a nice little listener than I can tunnel into dump critical data on demand. Shhhh, don't tell Brian. Everything will be encrypted and I'll write some sort of management software to go with it.