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

[Theodore Chen]

--- Taka Mizutani <t44tqtro at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Wouldn't I need multiple copies of Retrospect to backup two computers and to
> save it to a third? That would be an easy $500 just for the backup software.

no.  you should take a look at software.emc.com and read the info there.

http://www.emcinsignia.com/assets/ds_win75per_en.pdf
"Out of the box, Retrospect protects the PC it is installed on and two
networked desktop or notebook computers."

so for $130, you've got automated backup protection for several computers.
one of the things i like about it is that it can recognize when identical
copies of files reside on different machines, and avoids making duplicate
copies.  that is a big space-saver when you have an 800 MB file that's
sitting in your central repository and you've copied it to your workstation
for editing (but haven't touched it yet).

> I already have 3x 320GB SATA drives ready to go, don't have a "server" that
> has SATA capability and I still need a data drive or two on the photo
> workstation regardless.
> 
> Does this really mean that I should really do both- have the "server" as the
> backup and run RAID on the workstation? The advantage to this would be that 
> I don't have to have a bunch of external USB hard drives sitting around 
> and PATA drives generally are cheaper in those large capacities (320 is 
> still the sweet spot that I'm seeing for price/capacity).

that's what i'd do.  you can attach all of those drives for the backup
to your workstation, but if you have another machine, you gain an additional
measure of reliability by putting the backup on a different computer.  i've
been tempted to buy a NAS from the local electronics store, but i have an
old computer with 5 drive bays and it gets the job done well.

i don't think you need RAID as much as you need backup, and that's the
conclusion i reached with my home setup.  RAID is cool, but i don't need
to complicate my life and i didn't want to spend time troubleshooting RAID
issues.  if one of my drives blows up on me, i'll buy a new drive and use
Retrospect to put the data back on it.  the only thing i've used Retrospect
for is to bring back corrupted or deleted files, and the file-by-file
restore is really nice.  i can select the version of the file i want to
restore, and i don't have to restore the whole directory or even disk.

by the way, if you must have RAID, the winXP RAID hack has one other
advantage in addition to being free: it's easily moved to another system
with completely different controllers.  otherwise, if you go with a HW
controller, you might want to buy two, because if the controller dies,
you may not be able to get the system up and running with a different
controller.

-teddy


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