I (think I'm) looking for something like 4 TB of storage from 3 x 2TB drives in an arrangement where you lose nothing if one fails.
Hi Chris,
What are you backing up to need 4Tb, a music or video collection or home movies?
I want it to sit on the Wifi network and get auto-backed up nightly.
As others have said not a good idea
I'm not looking here for offsite storage, or portablility.
As far as I know, cloud storage winds up the costs and from what I've used, it's slooow.
I know you are not comfortable with Cloud Backup but in reality that is the way everything is going in the future. There are numerous companies but one that springs to mind is Livedrive
http://www.livedrive.com/ForHome/#CompareProducts For the basic Backup, this is only £3 per month and for £36 per year you have unlimited backup, (a third of the price of a 2Tb USB hard drive which will probably not last three years). You simply install a client on one PC and it will backup in the background without intervention. I notice from your signature that you live in London so assume you have a full 8Mb or greater download and 844Kb upload speed. The initial upload will obviously take some time but after that it only backs up new and changed files. If you have a Hotmail account you automatically get 7Gb free Skydrive which you could use for essential precious files like family photos.
I've got a few odd USB drives plugged into a pc at the moment, not into the router. Don't know how.../if... to do that.
Any recommendations on where to look or what for?
Without spending a lot on a NAS enclosure like Qnap, (the cheaper versions are not very reliable, and beware Buffalo as they use a proprietary filing system which is nearly impossible to rebuild and recover the data on a windows PC) the alternative is to have several external 1 or 2Tb hard drives and back up to each of them in turn. USB 2.0 is OK, USB 3.0 is better but eSata is probably as fast and cheaper.
I may have the wrong idea though.
And what software would manage it. Does it come in a bundle?
There are loads of free backup utilities on the internet but
Cobian backup comes to mind. It does incremental backups and you can have several profiles so that Monday you backup to disk 1 Wednesday you can backup to disk 2 and Friday to disk 3 etc. Another reliable free option is
AutoVer. This monitors folders in real-time and provides incremental backup. Alternatively use windows
SyncToy or windows built in
XCopy or
Robocopy (if you have windows 7) and a scheduled task . I can help with a backup script but there are lots of tutorial on the internet.
The only problem with large hard drives is the reliability. It seems the larger capacity they get the shorter lifespan they have. I run my own IT support company and I have replaced numerous 1 and 2Tb hard drives for customers who have had them for between 6months and 1year. It also doesn't matter what manufacturer of disk, they all suffer from the same issue unless you pay top dollar for Server Hard drives.
I have 8 Tb of storage in a Windows 7 Home server I built and use Drive Bender for redundancy across the 4 hard drives. If one (or two) hard drives fail the data is spread across the remaining two or three drives and may be recovered. This is not Raid in the true sense but based on Microsoft's original Drive Extender technology built into Home Server. I then backup all my documents to one 1Tb hard drive, all my Photos to another 2Tb HDD and then backup everything again to the cloud as full belt and braces. Ripped DVDs and downloaded films I backup directly to the cloud. If I lose them I already have the DVD or can download it again.
Hope this helps
Fozzie