Protect your data!

As previous posts have made clear, I am a bit of a packrat. I might need that 24V AC power supply sometime, so it goes in the power supply drawer, along with MANY others.

Needless to say, this collective nature applies to the digital realm as well. Over the past 20 years, I have collected a terabyte or few of digital data. Between a decade or so of email, amusing pictures, sound samples, documents and all my digital media files, I maintain a pretty good-sized file server at home to keep all this data in one place.

Keeping it organized is certainly an omnipresent challenge (as it is everywhere else in my life), but I'm less concerned that it will be lost now.

When the 10-year-old computer that was my home server finally refused to boot even a newly-installed OS, I took the opportunity to build anew the server and tackle the issue that had caused me concern for a few years - how to back up all the important stuff?

DVD media has a lot of capacity, but once you get to a certain amount of data, it becomes a bit cumbersome to burn all those discs. Also, as the data changes, how do you keep track of the new from the old on all that separate, often read-only media?

I liked the online backup options much better, as I have good cable-based broadband at the house, and their software will track the changes to the files. However, in order to leverage best the inexpensive "unlimited" online options, the client must be installed on a "workstation" OS - such as Windows XP or 2000 Professional. The second caveat is that the backup software is smart enough to only back up data on locally-attached drives. It will not include mapped network drives or USB-attached volumes in its backup set.

Much as I like Windows 2000 Pro, I figured that if this system was going to have the longest legs, it was best to stick with something that wasn't already out of current support, so Windows XP Professional it was. All the "server" apps I needed it to run (TiVo Desktop, Rio Receiver server, VMware server, as well as file/print sharing) would run fine there - all that was missing was a DNS and DHCP server, which I can get by without for the moment.

Trouble was, I didn't have much extra space on the XP server I had built. It was an amalgamation of various drives, and only one disk was protected from failure by a second mirrored disk. Much as I liked having the online backup, I'd much rather protect from failure in the first place. But if I had a second server, how would I back *that* up? I only wanted to have one server and backup set to maintain.

Enter the home SAN. I have worked with UNIX systems for a long time, and thought I might have found a loophole - iSCSI-attached volumes are block devices just like local disk. Would my backup software (Carbonite) see through my ruse and refuse to back up the data on those "locally attached" iSCSI volumes?

I bought several big drives on sale and installed them into one chassis, and installed Openfiler. Openfiler is a general-purpose storage device - it can act as a Windows file server, as an NFS server or as an iSCSI SAN device. It is not terribly easy to figure out if you are tech-challenged, but it is a worthy alternative to buying a "real" SAN. The system is flexible and permits you to build RAID volumes in software as well as in hardware. I wholeheartedly recommend gigabit ethernet hardware for communications between the server and the SAN (if you can make the whole path speak Jumbo Frames, so much the better) if you'd like performance to be as good as it can be.

Am I happy with what I've assembled? Thus far, yes. Speed to the SAN-attached disks is not horribly slow (between 75 and 200 Mbit), mainly limited by the speed of the controller card. I can always add additional space to the server by adding more drives to the SAN (I have 3 free SATA controller ports). And best of all, the Carbonite software *does* backup the SAN disks.