Right now I dont have the money to pay for 2 x 2tb drives and the lack of storage is now getting to be an issue.
Do any of you guys have experience with usb distros that will be easy enough for me to add sabnzbd and a few other bits? Would like to keep most of the functionality of UnRAID but dont want the back up security. I've not had much experience of usb installs other than UnRAID, which has pretty much worked faultlessly.
Which leads me to my second question. What would be the best option for cloud based services? I'd much rather back up my important stuff to the cloud, as it were, than run my own backup strategy.
Cheers.
The Acronis TrueImage (http://www.tekforums.net/computing-technology-web-communication/new-acronis-2013/) thread has a sort of discussion on could services. At the moment there are a fair few options out there.
Bitcasa (http://www.bitcasa.com/) - It's currently free while in Beta, I've not used it for a while as it was very buggy but it could have shaped up nicely now, the gist of it is you drop everything you want clouded into specific folder(s) flagged in Bitcasa, then these folders are automatically synced with the Bitcasa cloud. If it's cheap when it goes final and they sort the software out it will be a good solution I think.
Google Cloud (http://cloud.google.com/pricing/cloud-storage.html) - I tried it for work, don't really like it at all, I don't think its particularly user friendly or convenient. Pricing is on the link, first 5GB is free, with data rates for beyond that on top.
Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/pricing) - Which I'm sure everyone has heard of and probably played with, I don't really care for it that much and stopped using it, it's more for people that need to access their files remotely or share them a lot, which I don't. Their free package is 2GB minimum and up to 18GB (500MB per referral).
Others that have been mentioned before are Carbonite and Mozy, I've no experience of them though. There's a website ranking them here that might be useful for a quick scan through to get an idea http://www.cloudstorage.org.uk/ (http://www.cloudstorage.org.uk/)
lol this thread (http://www.tekforums.net/general-discussion/the-cloud-evaporates/) brings the whole discussion full circle ;D
If you do chose drop box, then the below thread has my guide to get extra space:
http://www.tekforums.net/guides-projects/how-to-get-more-free-space-on-dropbox-(potentially-over-19gb) (http://www.tekforums.net/guides-projects/how-to-get-more-free-space-on-dropbox-(potentially-over-19gb))
I had a look through some of those on that link in my above post, beware that a lot of them seem to promise a lot for free but actually when you read further deliver very little without the words 'monthly plans' 'rates' and 'prices' suddenly appearing, but no links to show what they are. Best off sticking to the more widely recognised ones I think.
Thanks for the suggestions, I think some serious thought will need to go into cloud resources. Mainly for family photos, videos and the like. Things that cant be replace. I dont mind paying for something either, as long as its not too expensive
Music and Videos are no real worry for me.
After some more consideration, I might stick with UnRAID and use the cloud based storage to clear out loads of the photos and videos on the UnRAID box. Which then brings me to the considering of being able to access cloud based storage via XBMC. Time to search.....
So, who offers the best paid for cloud based storage?
I don't think there are many if any using it on here, although I'm starting to look in to it..
How much stuff do you want to put on the cloud?
And also depends what you mean by best :) whatever you choose I'd make sure that you are only using the cloud for a backup and not a permanent storage location for your files.. look at the last link above ;)
I read that Bitcasa is going to be £10/month for 500Tb
no idea if it's true tho....
I'm waiting for google to get going properly....
My main usage would be photos and videos, all family stuff. Any films and music will not be backed up by any cloud based service.
Google drive or Amazon's offering will give security of being a big company so they won't disappear like smaller start ups.
Try http://www.crashplan.com/ (http://www.crashplan.com/) use friends storage to act as cloud along with any other devices you own or pay a small monthly fee for online storage.
Or Carbonite.
I myself use sugarsync and Dropbox or my own vps which (thread about it in bargains and freebies) cost me $15 for 1 year. 500gb traffic a month, 20gb hdd space, downside you have to sort your own server out, it's a Linux box on the net, what you do with it is up to you.
Quote from: Adrock on September 20, 2012, 00:56:47 AM
My main usage would be photos and videos, all family stuff. Any films and music will not be backed up by any cloud based service.
Google drive or Amazon's offering will give security of being a big company so they won't disappear like smaller start ups.
Google drive means your data will be examined for advertising relevant keywords and metadata to help them target advertising better. Just as they do with email.
I really don't like Google's offering at all and as M3ta7h3ad pointed out they are quick to use your data and start trying to rope you in to other services, but I totally forgot about Amazon's service. If I wanted to get into bed with a big boy I'd probably go with them.
Looking at these sites makes me laugh, they all complete copies of each other ironically and you really have to dig to find useful info on the services.
I bought a recent Android phone and got given a heap of free dropbox space, I'm at 30.2Gb free now. Might be an option if you have a recent phone and haven't signed up to dropbox yet?
also, with the dropbox app, for every gig of photos you upload, they give you an extra gig of storage for free... up to 5 gig
once you have the extra space it's yours free for life
I was going to upload photos just for the free space.... just kept hitting the photo button while I was watching a film one day.... but it was going to take forever so I gave up
oh... it's videos and photos btw :-)
don't know if this is relevant to the use case as the thread has developed, but Amazon have just launched a new service called Glacier which is designed for long term archival and backup storage.
It's $0.01 per GB per month for storage, but retrieval takes up to 5 hours and retrieving above a certain percentage of your archive incurs a cost (which still seems to be pretty reasonable for occasional use). Basically the pricing model is designed to encourage use for long term storage of stuff you almost never access, but want to know is safe if you ever need it.
AFAIK there are no clients available yet, but could really make the cloud more attractive for long term disaster recovery backups.
BTW just in case anyone doesn't know, Dropbox uses Amazon S3 under the hood. From what I've seen, that's a very good thing.
Everyone uses Amazon S3, its a great platform, it's very reliable. $20 for 2TB of storage per month is pretty decent, that does sound ideal for most people's backup solutions.
Glacier looks very interesting. For my current photo requirements it'd cost me less than 10p a month, heh. Also, photos are the kinds of things that get stored away somewhere and only looked at very ocassionally. Sounds perfect for Glacier.
Quote from: Clock'd 0Ne on September 22, 2012, 11:20:19 AM
Everyone uses Amazon S3, its a great platform, it's very reliable. $20 for 2TB of storage per month is pretty decent, that does sound ideal for most people's backup solutions.
it sounds good for things like photos etc...
but £130 a year for 2TB is a bit steep.... might as well just buy the drives for that...
Quote from: knighty on September 22, 2012, 15:14:27 PM
Quote from: Clock'd 0Ne on September 22, 2012, 11:20:19 AM
Everyone uses Amazon S3, its a great platform, it's very reliable. $20 for 2TB of storage per month is pretty decent, that does sound ideal for most people's backup solutions.
it sounds good for things like photos etc...
but £130 a year for 2TB is a bit steep.... might as well just buy the drives for that...
I dont know about you but my 2 TB drives don't come with N+ redundant power, cooling, fire suppression systems, aren't accessible around the world, hosted across multiple sites and store data in such a manner to guarantee its safety, nor come with a little man who replaces them in the middle of the night if they fail :)
I can see his point though, buy two 2TB drives (although they aren't quite cheaper than the cost) and already you've got a redundant backup to lock away somewhere.
Quote from: M3ta7h3ad on September 23, 2012, 13:26:21 PMI dont know about you but my 2 TB drives don't come with N+ redundant power, cooling, fire suppression systems, aren't accessible around the world, hosted across multiple sites and store data in such a manner to guarantee its safety, nor come with a little man who replaces them in the middle of the night if they fail :)
easy to have a drive somewhere else /work/parents/mates house etc... easy to setup access from anywhere
but I guess if my house and factory both burn down... I'll loose some photos... omg n NO !!!!!!!
if there's a power cut at both sites... I won't be able to access my data for a while... big woop
etc. etc.
Depends how much the data means to you. I was talking about this with a mate at work....
Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Skydrive - These services give enough data for most people to backup documents / important information.
Flickr Pro ($24 p/year) gives you unlimited photo storage (normal peoples photos aren't over 50mb each).
YouTube will allow most people to backup any home video in a quality they are happy with.
So that leaves movies/tv shows/music/games which take up the majority of space on peoples computers/devices... no matter how they were obtained (legally or illegally) they can easily be downloaded again - even if you uploaded to a cloud service somewhere you would still need to download them again from that so why bother?
I'm thinking of consolidating my current two machines into one. I currently have an XBMC/Satellite box doing its thing whilst the microserver does its unRAID tricks rather neatly, although I think something in sabnzbd is causing it to fall over every once in a while. The Satellite function never panned out as I hoped, mythtv is just too clunky right now for my needs.
Snapraid looks like the perfect replacement for unraid in that it'll allow me to run a full linux os, afaik I can do things like exclude the OS from parity calculations so that only data I'm storing in the microserver will be backed up. The full linux os will then allow me to stick my XBMC install onto it, I will hopefully be able to get it to automatically back up photos/videos to whatever method I decide to go with in the future too.
So, with a decent graphics card to do all the decoding is there anything I need to be aware of from a performance viewpoint on the microserver?
Also, are there any full distros that'll run off a usb stick without causing lotsa writes and all that? Once its entirely configured it should just be a matter of leaving things be or will even reading from it a lot cause problems?
Basically I'm trying to avoid using up a precious Sata connection within the microserver because eventually I'll have tons of hard drives, hopefully.
In terms of hardware performance you should be fine for whatever you need to throw at it once you have a good enough graphics card in to do the decoding. Maybe you'd want to stick in an extra 1GB of RAM, but in terms of processor power it should be fine.
Does snapraid work in the same type of parity based RAID as unRAID? I might look into it, although I'm pretty happy with unRAID to be honest.
As far as I can tell, snapraid has pretty much the same option as unRAID in terms of the parity based redundancy. The main reason I'm interested in it is because I wont be tied down to the os like with unRAID.
I'm gonna do a bit of digging soon enough to work everything out.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/aufsRootFileSystemOnUsbFlash - Gonna follow that to create a Lubuntu install on a USB stick and make it read only. Nothing, in theory, will need to be written to the system if everything is set up correctly. Media file serving with parity drive and some other little bits and pieces like sabnzbd that seem to be making UnRAID fall over at the moment.
It'll also means I should be able to do things like automated backup easier because ubuntu is well supported and there are loads of guides for idiots about. RAM size will be the thing I need to be careful of though, as its currently the shipped standard I think I'm gonna have to increase that to the max 8GB if I'm to essentially run everything off RAM.
Acquired a UPS too, so I'll have that set up to ensure any power failure will make it shutdown nice and safely. Of course, a read only OS means it'll boot up perfectly following a shut down anyway, just means I'll keep the hard drives safe from a sudden power outage.
However, I'm not too sure XBMC will like running on a read only memory stick, so this could turn out to just be a replacement of unRAID at the moment. I'll have to see how much RAM SnapRAID and all the other stuff takes up before I commit to transferring XBMC over.
Also, my other concern with UnRAID is the limit on the number of drives. Obviously you can pay for more but at £100 or so for the full version it isn't cheap, and I'd much rather spend that money on a hard drive at the moment. SnapRAID should hopefully do everything I need without having to pay out and by the sounds of it, its very reliable.
From reading a bit about snapraid the only thing I didn't really like is the fact that it's not realtime, not that that is a huge issue. I do like the fact it can go on a Windows install too. The only offputting thing is the daunting prospect of having to try and port 5TB of data over to it.
Do you have to port data over to it? Surely with the data on the hard drives it'll just be a matter of calculating the parity again? It might take a bit of time but it shouldn't be that bad. Unless I'm mistaken...
I'll have to look into it more anyhow. Got a few others things to look at too, such as my router and satellite set ups.
unRAID uses the ReiserFS filesystem, while the data is easily accessible provided you go through unRAID I don't think you can simply swap them out to a different system (unless that also happens to use or can read ReiserFS, like another flavour of linux).
If you've got a rooted Android phone, I can hook you up with a 50gb dropbox account for 2 years :D
Quote from: Clock'd 0Ne on October 03, 2012, 09:09:48 AM
unRAID uses the ReiserFS filesystem, while the data is easily accessible provided you go through unRAID I don't think you can simply swap them out to a different system (unless that also happens to use or can read ReiserFS, like another flavour of linux).
Ubuntu support reiserfs out of the box from what I've read. Bought myself the 8gb of RAM required for the microserver today, so this is a goer, I think :/
I just have to convince the wife everything will be ok. If I lose the photos I reckon this could be one of my penultimate posts.
Maybe its worth dumping them onto an FTP/cloudspace first just in case?
Alternatively I've got an unopened pack of 50x CDRs I can post to you ;D
CDRs, how 1990's of you Clock'd.
Yeah I think Glacier could be the one for me too. Nice and easy and I should never have to get them back again if my plans work as they should. I will also, eventually, have an off-site backup at my Mum's place which has a 1tb WD NAS sitting in the front room ready for the family to fill with rubbish once I manage to fix the bloody ftp on it ¬_¬