So I’ve recently been blessed with another addition to my family, and with a new baby comes thousands of videos, pictures, wav files, text documents, pdf scans… well, you get the idea. At any rate, traditional spindle storage is far too unreliable for assets of this importance. I looked into buying a tape backup solution of sorts, but the ones I wanted are way too expensive and since I’m on a budget I decided to go with a combination of storage solutions:
1. Local storage. On the workstation that I pull the images off of the various cameras on, I store the media locally. This provides easy access, but sadly no redundancy in case of a hard drive failure. My hard drive on that computer is almost new, so I do have some sense of reliability.
2. Fileserver with ZFS storage (OpenIndiana). I have a fileserver that I use for media and various data storage needs that has a large ZFS RAID on it (raidz). It’s basically RAID-5 across five 1TB SATA hard drives. This provides insurance in that if one of the drives fail, I’ll still be able to get at the data.
3. Cloud storage. The cloud storage provider I chose to use is SpiderOak. This gives me 100GB of offsite, cloud storage for $8/mo.
So to explain my SpiderOak choice, I found that it provides a good subset of features/security/space for price. There are many other places that offer offsite cloud storage at a comparable or better price, but for the compatibility with Linux and so many glowing reviews, I thought I’d give these guys a shot.
For you guys who are going to say “Use Dropbox!” I say no. Heres why.
No Linux Support – This is big for me. Linux is a huge player in the home/small business market and to not have a client for it shows either that the company is too poor to hire a few Linux developers, or they just don’t care. Either reason is good enough for me to not use it. And yes, I know I can fudge it by having the dropbox client on a windows box, and then sharing the dropbox folder on the network, and then copy the files from the fileserver to the dropbox folder over the network. You know the problem with that? I have to rely on windows. With patch tuesday, and OS failures on days ending with ‘y’, I figure that wasn’t such a good idea for data I actually care about. (Yes, it’s Windows 7. Yes, I have an 6.4 experience index rating). It’s simple file backups. I should be able to do it on an 486DX with 32MB of RAM.
And I can.
With Linux.
Just sayin’
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Nice article Derek – I hadn’t heard of OpenIndiana, but if it’s anything like it’s cousin Indiana Jones, it should be a cunning and flexible OS
Otherwise, I have used Dropbox on my Linux machines for quite awhile, but I will give Spideroak a whirl and see what it’s all about.
apt-cache search dropbox
mint-dropbox – Dropbox integration for Linux Mint
nautilus-dropbox – Dropbox integration for Nautilus
Ttyl!