NAS Server. Should I or Should I Not
For the people who do not know what NAS stands for, it stands for Network-attached Storage. Do you have an old computer that is just sitting there collecting dust? I for one when I bought my iMac and MacBook my Dell became a dust collector. So one day I decided I needed to set something up to backup my files. I know I could have burnt stuff to DVD or buy an external hard drive to store them on.
Now for the Mac I could use a portable HD to setup Time Machine. Now my concern with Time Machine is that as far as I know you can only use it for one computer. Now I have not researched it so I could be wrong. With the external if you do run multiple operating systems like Linux or Windows then you have to worry about how you format your HD. Also if you buy a portable that needs a power source then I need to fiddle behind my desk to plug in the power adapter for the HD. What a mess I’ll tell ya.
Now if you have the luxury of having a dual layer burner you could burn all your backup data. Now I will tell you that data that does not change I still put to DVD but why waste it all for stuff that changes. You then need to setup databases or spreadsheets on what stuff is on what DVD or CD. I do not know about you but I would not want to worry about all that stuff.
So this brings me to setting up a NAS server. All you need is a computer with a decent size hard drive and if you want to hide it a wireless card. The other option here is buying a time capsule cause that is basically a NAS server. So if you decide the old computer you then have 2 choices for the OS that I would use. One is FreeNAS which is based off FreeBSD and the other would be Ubuntu. I basically chose Ubuntu cause I can run other things off it like a web server and set it up as a puppet master for some of my virtual machines.
So what are you going to choose? Do you have any opinions on what you think about storage backups? Post a comment and let us know what you believe the is the best backup solution.
I’ve got a couple of Macs and a couple of Linux boxes sharing a 750 gig USB drive hooked up to a Apple Airport Extreme (essentially the same as Time Capsule). The drive can be hooked up directly to any of the Macs and they can backup that way (so yes, they can share an external drive), or they can backup over the network. My Linux boxes back up to it over Samba (rsync + chron FTW). I try to remember to mirror the drive’s contents to an external RAID that I keep powered down most of the time because it’s loud. It works for my Linux/Mac environment with relatively little maintenance. I’ve heard good things about FreeNAS as well.