Home Network: Backups
February 28th, 2009
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With four computers in our house, we have data everywhere. We knew that we needed to maintain a backup of the data in case a hard drive dies, but we weren’t sure of the best setup. We also wanted to have a networked device for our music, movies, and pictures. After scanning two shoeboxes-full of our old photos and disposing of the originals, it became even more important to have redundant backups. We set up the network illustrated above to have all of our data backed up to a central location that we can access from any computer and where it can be copied to an external hard drive and stored in a fire-proof box for even more insurance that we won’t lose anything important.
Beginning on the left of the diagram, our blogs, which are hosted off-site, are backed up to our laptops by a manually-run script. Our laptops are our primary computers for web-browsing, e-mail, listening to music, and watching movies. The data on our laptops, including the backups of our blogs, are then backed up to our network-attached storage (NAS) device along with select folders from our desktop computers. We use our desktop computers solely for playing games and using Photoshop, so we only need to back up our game-save files and the Photoshop files that are currently in use (I don’t save the .psd files after I finish editing a photo).
We also ripped every CD and DVD that we own to the NAS. The originals are stored in a plastic bin in our closet. When we want to watch a movie, we connect to the NAS. Same for music, since I only have enough space for a few GBs of music on my laptop at a time. Finally, all of our photos – nine years worth of photos together, plus scanned photos from our childhood – are also stored on this shared device. I dump all new photos here and copy them temporarily to my desktop computer when I want to edit them.
The NAS holds two 500 GB hard drives making up a RAID 1 array. This means that whatever is put on one hard drive is automatically synchronized on the second hard drive. If one hard drive dies, we have a redundant copy. This data is then copied a few times a year to an external hard drive which we store in a fire-proof box in our closet in case our condo burns down.
Coming Next: Home Network: Organizing Photos
