According to Linus Torvolds, I'm not a real man. But I can live with that; I don't want all my data uploaded for FTP mirroring.
The Tullett house is, laptop wise, almost exclusively MacBook Pro based. Sure there's a netbook which boots Linux and a couple of laptops which we're about to ship to The Gambia, but if they're nuked by some random disaster I don't really care.
Our laptops however are home to our entire photo collection and iTunes libraries. Add onto that all personal documents, some of which aren't in the cloud, and should disaster strike there will be a lot of tears.
A feature I've loved in OS X for the past few releases is Time Machine. As a sysadmin for over ten years, I've rolled one or two backup solutions. I'm still trying to find a decent alternative to Norton Ghost for Windows – it's a problem which should have been solved by free software by now! – but that's a subject for another post, as it's a Windows problem, not Mac.
If you do not have a Time Capsule, wireless backing up is difficult unless you've a spare machine and bunch of disks laying around. Oh, and time to configure Netatalk and a bunch of other stuff. These days, it's time I'm short of.
Due to a screw up long before Xmas, I ended up with three spare 2Tb hard drives, which have been sitting unused in a cupboard; the other three which had been ordered at the same time had already found a home.
During a talk on WGC (a chat forum I use) last week, I heard that there was a £100 cash-back offer on HP Microservers at Servers+; making the machine only £100 to buy. On the same day I was also pointed to an open source NAS project called FreeNAS. The seed was sown.
Saturday morning I took delivery of the Microserver, and within an hour had the three drives installed. Digging out a trusty old 2Gb USB stick, I installed FreeNAS and booted it up.
Within a minute I was presented with a functional GUI to configure the machine. Over the course of the next hour or two I learned about how to configure the software. Setting up a RAID-5 configuration – allowing for 4Tb usable storage from the 6Tb installed – I created two volumes of 1Tb each for the laptops, leaving 2Tb free for future use. Configuring access to the shares was trivial: click a few buttons to enable AFP and set permissions on the shares for the users. Done.
Configuring the Macs was also straight forward. With one running Snow Leopard and the other Lion, wireless Time Machine backups work out of the box (as opposed to earlier versions which required tweaks to the system's configuration.) Having selected the disk, the first backup – Rae's machine – started
200Gb was never going to be quick, especially going over a wireless network, so it took most of the day (and into the night) to complete the first backup. Futures ones will be quicker as they only back up new file or changed files. This morning I set my own laptop up to start its backup. At the moment the NAS is pushing 40Mbit, not too shabby, considering the data's going over the wireless network.
The other 2Tb will probably be reserved for sharing on the VPN Mesh which is still being set up. 250Gb each should be plenty, especially as the data will be replicated over multiple sites.
Mostly though, I'm happy to finally have automatic backups in place which don't require plugging the laptops into external drives – a manual step which is guaranteed to fail at some point, and indeed does when I get the notification that a backup hasn't been completed in ten days. How much work/data could be lost in ten days? It doesn't bear thinking about…
Related posts:
