Tag Archives: backups

NAS or not to NAS

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Been reading about NAS and with 2 computers to upgrade and daughters that have a stack of photos some of which are not backed up I wondered if this would be a solution. I have no idea if it is – colour me clueless on this one. The setup:

me: 2 mac minis that are almost the same in content. Each has a HD attached, likewise they too are almost similar. My laptop/netbook contents can be ignored.
jacq: laptop running Vista
girls: macbook each

Images/files should be shared as we exchange those by email or usb right now, music really should be shared so Jacq can access all of her music upstairs. I have yet to find the equivalent of a digital jukebox with a really clear display and easy to use controls (an ipod touch is not the answer here as good as they may otherwise be for reduced sight and hand mobility). So I understand that a NAS keeps everything together, you add drives to add redundancy and once you are set up everything goes swimmingly. Or do I not need one as it would be overkill and could be done – that is automatic backups and sharing – much more cheaply? Wifi or wires? Plug and Play?

No long post

Reply

I’ve been playing with the command line and cron jobs to produce another backup strategy for my websites and I thought I’d blog the result. I was going to because I could not find what I wanted which is why I scraped together what I read in various places and tested daily to be sure of what I was going to write. It’s just about ready for me to click Publish and I went to check one last thing – and realised that Automator could do every step of the whole thing perfectly. Damn. It was written many times that Automator could do lots but not the ‘how’ and a ‘how’ is nice before you get your feet wet. So on the bad side I don’t need to produce the huge post, on the good side I have learned many commands I’ll not use again. Still, I do get to write ‘crontab -e’ when I do publish it.

Backing up .. JD style

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One computer here has all the photos on. Every night they are backed to up an external HD which is on the desk. But if someone broke in and nicked the computer they’d nick the backup too. Hardly ideal. And my working computer has a lot of info I don’t want to lose, J has work and the kids have work and personal stuff they don’t want to lose.

So, mini-1 backed up to the external HD. PC backed some docs to Mozy and the rest to the other HD inside the case. mini-2 didn’t really get backed up and the laptop D uses didn’t either. I had Dropbox as one option for some backups but that was for temp files / transfer really and it wasn’t something I’d used a lot. I’d bought Chronosync for the mac and Syncback for the PC and used them both – they are excellent. But it was not as smooth an overall process as it could be. I had to check all was going okay, compare files and hope that if I’d asked them to do something that they did. So I needed a solution. I’d heard about Jungledisk but only vaguely looked at it.

Then Mark posted about his backups. Our needs and reasons differ but both he and Ryan mentioned Jungledisk. That works as a recommendation for me. So off I went, tried the free setup and once I saw how easy it was I gave them $20.
Each computer has it’s own bucket. It simplifies things here. Each has selected directories to backup and they are set to be daily. I went with the Jungledisk plus option so I have web access to all my buckets. So I can check from this machine that backups are being done (and that P has not moved her Music directory so it gets backed up…).

Web access is through a subdomain at Jungledisk

Jungle disk screenshot

And each bucket opens to subsequent directories down to the actual files.
The last modified information is there as you would expect.

Jungle disk screenshot

The main backup I did was 18gb and took around 3 days. Since then it has checked daily. I then added this machine and checked how that did and as all was well set up the others. Note – this was not me checking that Jungledisk was good. I knew that. I was checking that I had done it right.
What I have not yet done is use it as a mapped drive so I can drag files onto it. (It’s on the desktop, just unemployed) My workflow is pretty fragmented right now (smultron, evernote, gmail, shovebox all information thrown in them randomly, files get copied into a USB drive or ftp’d to another site) but this may ease that, esp for using the laptop. I have no need to set it up so that each machine can constantly access it to pass files from machine to machine.
One thing I will add is site backups. I’ll set up Transmit/Automator for that so long as that too can be set up and forgotten.

So in the unlikely event that all machines are suddenly taken away the most important stuff is somewhere else, and I can also get at them from anywhere. I really don’t care if when I click a machine and it dies if what I think is important is backed up. I have SuperDuper but again if someone breaks in they’ll probably nick the hardware. So I either hide hardware or put the files out of reach (and yes I know about the £200 Time Capsule. This would suit just 2 machines here and that’s not a good use of money when cheaper will be better). I have one last thing to do though – download it all to check it’s actually there. I know it will be but it’s something I know I have to do.

The goal was backups that are done and done consistently. The best part was that I have one solution for windows, mac and linux – all of which are here. Jungledisk was $20, to have Jungledisk Plus adds $1/month and Amazon have their data charges. It’s small money and even it it were double it’s still peace of mind money.