[s-cars] NAC- need advice on photo workstation, RAID and some other ???s

Mon Jun 12 01:46:00 EDT 2006

well, that's the great thing about Retrospect (which came from Dantz, the company
  acquired by EMC).  it'll run on a winXP machine.  as long as your storage computer
  has winXP, you're set.  of course, the various flavors of windows server will work,
  too.  check the EMC website for Retrospect system requirements.

  i would set up an old machine with an IDE or SATA controller (cheap) and
  a bunch of 300 GB IDE or SATA drives.  right now, 300 GB provides the best
  bang for the buck in high density storage (500 GB is $190, 300 GB is $90).  for
  example, i have an old AT tower with a 900 MHz AMD athlon CPU, 512 MB RAM,
  and five HDs.  it works just fine as a fileserver, because it doesn't get a lot of
  utilization.  5x300GB would cost you $450 and give you 1.5TB of storage.
  i have only 100baseT hardware and i find that 50MB files move pretty quickly with
  this setup.  gigabit stuff is cheap and i'd upgrade, but i ran cat5 cable in my 
  house, which is all that was available at the time.  i've thought about replacing
  it with new cable, but i haven't felt the need for faster network speeds so far.

  you should understand that RAID and Retrospect provide different kinds of protection
  and they can be complementary.  it's probably overkill for you to use RAID and
  backup software, but RAID will give you another layer of protection.  if you're
  a belt and suspenders man, you may like this approach.  RAID controllers are
  pretty cheap now anyway.

  you might want to do a web search for discussion on Retrospect and RAID.
  note that Retrospect was focused on the Apple market for years before it
  became available for windows, so you may see a lot of Apple-related discussion.

  -teddy

Taka Mizutani <t44tqtro at gmail.com> wrote:
  Teddy-
Thanks for the info on EMC Retrospect, I think that's going to be on my shopping
list.

I don't quite understand your suggestion of a disk farm- Matt or someone else also
suggested this, but to really implement a backup server, wouldn't I need some sort 
of server OS running on the box and also how would I control all of those drives? I'd
still need a decent controller setup, wouldn't I?

I've already got two PCs on my desk and a laptop nearby, I don't really want a third- 
we already have a third PC in the basement office. Everything is linked up, but not
networked- I was thinking about moving to Gigabit switches if I'm going to network everything.

I don't plan on keeping my photo workstation online 24/7, just plan on firing it up as needed, 
with pretty much zero internet access (other than loading software updates and the like). I will
use its horsepower for Photoshop, scanning film and old photos, burning DVDs and MP3
encoding, that's about it.

I will keep the PC I'm writing this on as my primary work PC, as it accomplishes all that I
need of it for now (Athlon XP 1800 w/ 1GB, 220GB of storage).

You all are the BEST knowledgebase when it comes to damn near everything, that's why I love 
this list!

Thanks,
Taka

  On 6/11/06, Theodore Chen <tedebearp at yahoo.com> wrote:  

--- Taka Mizutani <t44tqtro at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Also, what do you think about the EMC Retrospect backup software?

i was going to suggest that (although i have to add a disclaimer that 
i work for EMC and managing the intellectual property portfolio for
retrospect is one of my responsibilities).

IMHO, it's a great solution, far better than using MS backup.  it
offers you the ability to set backup windows, and you can keep multiple 
versions.  you can schedule incremental, differential, and full backups.
this protects you against data changes or corruption caused by the
application (which RAID isn't going to).  disk space is very cheap
these days.  i'd probably set up an old machine as a disk farm 
by filling it with 300GB hard drives ($90 each these days) and i'd
just do backup to disk.

-teddy

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