[X4U] Using a Quicksilver G4 as a NAS?

[David Ledger]

At 19:33 -0500 2/1/09, Neil wrote:
>>  You say you don't need RAID. Do you have a good way of backing up 
>>these extra drives (or are they the backup for other places)? If 
>>not, RAID 5 makes sense. (When will someone make an economical 
>>external RAID 5 box with 5 drives? It's the simplest, cheapest way 
>>to do RAID 5).
>
>I'm planning to use a few drives as back-ups for my three primary 
>Macs.  The other drives are for storage, but I plan to get an 8-bay 
>USB drive to plug in once a week to back-up the storage and to have 
>a second back-up for my primary Macs.  I don't consider RAID 5 to be 
>a true back-up solution to itself because it doesn't help if the 
>problem is data corruption, theft, lightning that destroys more than 
>one drive, etc.  The back-up should be off-line most of the time.

RAID isn't meant as a backup solution, it's just a more reliable 
'drive'. It will detect disc data corruption, but obviously not 
application or user data corruption. Neither will mirroring or even 
cloning or regular backups unless you keep a hierarchy of versions. 
Time machine with a well oversized TM drive is a good solution here.

David


-- 
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
david.ledger at ivdcs.co.uk
www.ivdcs.co.uk