Most affordable way to securely store 5+ TB?

[doodler85]

I think the course of action we're going to take is to eventually have two of those $100 4-drive enclosures plugged into his tower via an ESATA expansion card. He wants to manually back everything up as he goes (he says for ease of mind, I can understand not trusting automation), and if for some reason the PSU blows up or overloads and fries all of the drives in one enclosure there's a second one in a physically different location.

I do love my old computer so perhaps in 6 months or a year when I upgrade my current machine I'll convert it into a server based on all the help provided so far.

As for where his current media is residing... it's on two external drives. Whether or not they will be used as tertiary back up or not (for those super precious files) I'm not sure... but it's always nice to have something smaller you can lug around so I doubt he'd sell them.

 

[taltamir]

Sounds like he found his perfect solution...

one thing, ideally the backup should be PHYSICALLY unplugged from both the USB AND the power, aka, there should be no cables going into it.

Why? if there is a lightening strike it can fry all attached equipment. Sure, you have surge protectors, but they are only able to protect against surges of a specific limited power, if the lightening strike is far enough away, surge protectors will protect you, if it is close enough to your house, it will fry it anyways. And a power surge can travel through other cables, ex, the USB cable. Plus a surge protector can be faulty.

He can save money by simply using his current two external drives as main storage and the one 4 drive enclosure for backup, or vice versa, use the 4 drive enclosure as main storage and the current external drives as backup.

Total price would be:
100$ 4 drive enclosure
200$ 2x2TB drives for the above mentioned enclosure

eSATA is really cool, but unless you find it very cheap I am not sure the cost is worth it.

anyways, just get the above for 300$, plug it in, and copy everything from his current 2 external drives. Just decide ahead of time which is backup and which is main to avoid cases of mix ups.

 

[doodler85]

Yep! He's on board with this idea...

Thanks again everyone.

 

[Computers_Plus]

man 3 pages later we end up with exactly what I said in the third post

 

[doodler85]

man 3 pages later we end up with exactly what I said in the third post

I'd like to think that 3 pages later we are all better people and will each take home cherished memories of our time together.

 

[Computers_Plus]

ah man your gonna make me cry lol...

 

[RebateMonger]

Will somebody pass the bottle, please?

 

[randomlinh]

for about $370 you can build a 4 gig external storage


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-001-_-Product

and a couple of 2TB drives

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822145369

Have you used this, or anyone else here? I am taking this doesn't do JBOD or anything, it strictly is giving you 4 separate drives, correct? I wanted to buy a drobo because it'd be easy to upgrade storage, but I'm not willing to pay that much for HDD failure protection. I'd rather just buy two of something like this. My intention is this would be my main store drive, working drive would become SSD. And figure out some way of backing up.

I'm avoiding a 2nd rig because don't want the space. First I've seen of something like this. Right around my price range if I can get the right eSATA on my comp. Any card suggestions?

to each his own but to me storing your data on line is foolish.

Why? So long as it's a backup and not your only copy... and it doesn't break the bank... and is secure. Granted, getting all that is virtually impossible when you're trying to back up 5TB of data, heh.

man 3 pages later we end up with exactly what I said in the third post

better that than not coming to any conclusion

 

[RebateMonger]

Have you used this, or anyone else here? I am taking this doesn't do JBOD or anything, it strictly is giving you 4 separate drives, correct?

From what I saw in the manual, it just presents four separate disks to the OS. There's no JBOD or RAID function built in.

 

[taltamir]

I'd like to think that 3 pages later we are all better people and will each take home cherished memories of our time together.

*holds up a beer* I love you guysh!

@JBOD: JBOD is actually a really bad idea, its all the drawbacks of raid0 with none of the benefits. If a single drive on the JBOD fails all data on all drives are gone, but you don't get the speed benefits of RAID0...
that being said, if a single JBOD drive fails the rest will be real easy to recover data from, while in RAID0 you couldn't... but I see no single possible reason to ever use JBOD (as in, concatenation, sometimes people use JBOD to refer to individual disks with no connection to each other)

 

[Computers_Plus]

right that would be strictly a static storage cube

 

[Modelworks]

If the data is truly valuable he needs 1 on site and 1 off site. So many people lose all their data from a home fire or flood when the backup and pc are in the same building.

For backing up 3,4 TB nothing beats tape. DAT or tape backup is the quickest and cheapest way to do it. You can get drives off ebay used that can do 200GB on 1 tape . Tapes are $7.

 

[Computers_Plus]

just burn weekly DVD backups and store them somewhere safe honestly you have more to worry about from drive failure then fire or flood

 

[taltamir]

just burn weekly DVD backups and store them somewhere safe honestly you have more to worry about from drive failure then fire or flood

5TB @ 5GB per DVD (I am rounding up, its actually 4.7) = 1000 DVDs...

 

[Computers_Plus]

very true 1000 DVD's would be to much did not think that one all the way through lol..

 

[Modelworks]

very true 1000 DVD's would be to much did not think that one all the way through lol..

That is the reason tape drives are still in demand. Nothing beats it for storage ability. The newer drives can store 2TB on one cartridge.

 

[taltamir]

If the data is truly valuable he needs 1 on site and 1 off site. So many people lose all their data from a home fire or flood when the backup and pc are in the same building.

For backing up 3,4 TB nothing beats tape. DAT or tape backup is the quickest and cheapest way to do it. You can get drives off ebay used that can do 200GB on 1 tape . Tapes are $7.

that is actually not a bad idea.