File Backups on a funky looking QNAP 209 Pro
Even with the rather small number of websites that I have at the moment (having sold off Spy Review now), it’s still important to take regular backups. I’ve had automatic website backups going for months now, which I started doing on my Mini ITX. However, I became very frustrated with the Mini ITX as a media centre due to a number of sound volume issues, codec issues and a broken DVD drive. So I decided that I needed a better alternative.
I had a number of requirements for my backup storage that fulfilled all of my requirements, for scheduled backups overnight as well as generic storage for my music and documents. Therefore this is what I needed:
- Some kind of RAID storage for redundancy in the event of a hard drive failure.
- A linux or other unix-based operating to allow me to run scripts over ssh to backup all of my websites.
- A wired ethernet connection with support for FTP and NFS.
- Large disks, in the range of 500GB available storage.
- Costing less than £500
Having done some research, it became clear that there was only one gadget that met all of my requirements, namely the QNAP 209-Pro with two 500GB disks set up in mirror mode with RAID. Costing £440, definitely not a cheap storage device, but worth it if it did what I needed.
I’ve had my file server for about 3 months now, and having spent some time hacking it I now have my own cron tasks running every night taking complete backups of all websites. I’ve also installed subversion on it and use it for my development work. I even have all of my music stored on it and have configured iTunes to use the file server as a network drive rather than a local drive.
My only concern now is the issue of if its stolen or damaged. I have excellent security at home, but just in case of an accident, I need some way of backing up the entire device at a remote location. I’ve yet to decide on how to do this, but I will soon! The cheapest option is to connect it to an external USB drive.
The more expensive and automatic approach is to purchase an identical unit and have it stored at my parent’s house. You can configure the QNAP 209-Pro to use rsync to create a remote mirror over the internet. Aside from bandwidth costs, there’s the cost of another file server. Even still, plus.net offer unlimited bandwidth at off-peak hours with their broadband packages.