I’ve been working a lot on storage and backup recently. Maybe I’ve gone a bit overkill, but I thought I’d document some of it here.

First, I had written of the Linksys NSLU2 (aka “”Slug”) before, here. That has been up and running really well. I have all the PC’s and MACs in the house rsync to it nightly, and then the Slug has a 2nd drive that synch’s nightly as well. And then I have a 3rd drive off site that I bring in once a month or so to keep up to date.

One issue with this solution is that my drives are all 160 GB and I’m now 70% full. The slug will handle any size drive(s) so that is not an issue, but it would be a bit of a pain and hard work to set up again. But at some point I will do that. I may just buy a new slug and 3 new drives… I haven’t decided yet!

Another issue is that the Mac’s HD was full. I set up an “archive” section on the slug so that we could off-load files manually to the archive and remove them from the mac. That’s fine, but see the point above about my slug drives being too small.

We also archived a bunch of stuff off to CD’s and DVD’s, and keep two copies, one on-site and one off-site. But with many of the recent reviews saying expect 2 – 3 years out of these, that’s a bit scary. Granted, that is with the lower end products, but even if you buy the higher end, name brand CDs/DVDs, how much longer can you really expect? It may be better to just have two large HD’s, one on-site and one off-site, than keep all the CDs/DVDs…

In addition to all that, I’ve been looking at some of the on-line storage and backup solutions. I would never keep my only copy of valuable data at these places, so it’s only one piece of the puzzle. I’ve played with 3 such services and will write mini-reviews in my next few posts.