possibly a Quantum Snap solution or a Cobalt Cube? both would fit the bill in at least one or more of your questions -John At 10:06 AM 11/16/2003, you wrote: ---------------------------------------- Founder, Lead Writer, Tech Analyst and Web Designer Boff-Net Technologies http://boff-net.dhs.org/index.html ---------------------------------------

Rich, Most NAS are using some form of OS or stripped down embedded OS like Linux. If you're using this as your primary repository I suggest the following: 2 small drives 4gb-9g (use for OS partition) Mirror these. Once your system is built out, I would recommend something like Ghost or Partition Manager and make an Image of your OS drive, then burn it to a CD, this way if your OS were to fail completely and you lost your mirror or mirror were to be corrupted you could build out a new OS partition in a matter of minutes by booting from a DOS disk and imaging the new drive. 1 small drive again like a 4gb for your SWAP (you could mirror, but I think on a small personal server, that is overkill for /swap) If you require any app above system apps, then I would place apps on another set of drives, and mirror them. Now for the important stuff, your data, definitely consider Raid 0+1, get a pair of raid controllers (IDE or SCSI, your choice) I prefer SCSI myself, setup your Raid, Raid 5 is best, it chews up the most disk space for the CRC data of the other disks for rebuilds, but its the most reliable.... Now on a seperate identical controller and drives, mirror the primary raid partition. Finally, a smart UPS system so your NAS server can orderly shutdown in the event of a power failure and your reduce data corruption. This is a good setup for low failure and fastest recovery. You can find some nice Dec (aka Compaq, aka HP) Storageworks RA8000's fairly cheap these days, I've worked with them and 12000's and they are wonderful systems, you can pick up a cheap fibre channel card and hook up a server right to if and serve the storageworks data from that server (like a very simple linux RH box or the like) Curt ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard A. Cini" <rcini(a)optonline.net> To: <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2003 10:06 AM Subject: On-line storage backup options and building suggestions

Jerome Fine replies: I don't think that my reply will be explicitly useful, but it might help you decide to look at some alternatives. I dislike Windows 98 SE, but it allows me to run Ersatz-11 and supports my e-mail under Netscape. My son also provides the support and refuses to support me except under Windows. In my case, I initially attempted to use a hardware solution to the RAID problem. I purchased a RAID 1 controller and ran a initial test to see if it was working. When I pulled the power plug on one of the hard drives, the system would not even boot. However, I did find that the controller supported UDMA 100 drives which made disk I/O MUCH faster than the previous system. The actual hardware is a 750 MHz Pentium III with the UDMA 100 controller and 3 * EIDE 40 GByte hard drives. However, I found that I use ONLY about 2 GBytes of file space on the C: had drive. D: and E: are used ONLY for backup. I also have access to a DVD burner about 3 times a year and a DVD reader all the time. The good part is that I am able to run Ersatz-11 (a PDP-11 emulator available at http://www.dbit.com/) and I obtain a speed of about 15 times a real DEC PDP-11/93. The bad part is that I am forced to chose Windows 98 SE since I also want to be able to use the monitor n 132 character mode under KED in RT-11. Now the backup solution. I have chosen GHOST as the backup program. Once a day, GHOST is used to make an image file of the C: drive - which takes about 6 minutes - on BOTH the D: and E: drives. Actually, I make the first copy from GHOST directly to the E: drive since it is on a different channel from the C: and D: hard drives. At the same time, I am also able to have GHOST make up a CRC file which contains a 128 bit CRC value for each of the 11,319 files on the C: hard drive. The CRC file is about 1 MByte and the image backup file is currently 870 MBytes - which is, unfortunately, too large for a CD. Which is where the DVD burner comes in handy. Once every 4 months, I copy 4 end-of-month images of the C: drive to a DVD for permanent long-term backup storage. On two occasions due to my own lack of understanding of what should not be done with Windows 98 SE, I have used the backup files to restore the C: drive. On one occasion, I even lost the D: drive as a result of the problem. Fortunately, with TWO copies of each daily image backup file, I am reasonably able to recover. Because the D: and E: drives can hold so many image files, I normally can "rotate" the image files by keeping the last 3 backup images on the E: drive while I delete all of the current backup images for the month on the D: drive. I then repeat the process with the E: drive. Each copy of each image file takes about 1 minute and the compare takes about 2 minutes. I spend less time each day making the copies and running the compares than it takes to type this e-mail. In addition, if I ever consider that a defragment of the C: drive is needed, I do a complete recovery using GHOST instead - just after I have done a backup. To check that the recovery is correct, I then compare the second CRC file with the previous CRC file. As long as both are identical, I am able to conclude that the "recovery" produced a set of files which are identical. So far after at least a few dozen recoveries, I have never found the two CRC files to be different, i.e. after I make a backup, then do a recovery, then make a second backup, the CRC files are identical. NOTE that GHOST requires a boot of DOS from a floppy when GHOST is being run, but the actual GHOST program may be on the hard drive to which the backup is being written. I have no connection with GHOST other than as a user. Additional questions are invited. Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine -- If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the 'at' with the four digits of the current year.