March 31st was World Backup Day - a day for reminding people that there are very few sounds more scary than the Click of Death coming from a hard drive inside your computer on which you have critical data files.
I've been pretty good at keeping duplicate sets of my media files, with a couple of obvious flaws in execution. First, I've been backing up on the fly, and while everything has been archived, it's not exactly organized well. Second, my backups have been essentially one-to-one, which doesn't take advantage of RAID architectures, is more labour intensive than it needs to be, and uses up more hard drives.
So, unRAID.
Everything I've read about unRAID suggests that it's a far better approach (cheaper, too) than buying a dedicated proprietary backup solution. Plus, it lets me tinker with putting a computer together, which I haven't done in a while - including having to pick and source components that will work together well and support unRAID's requirements.
The server's up and running now with two data drives and a parity drive - the basic, free unRAID configuration. I haven't copied much over to it yet, but it seems to be running well so far. Fingers crossed!
No comments:
Post a Comment