New quick, easy backup system - Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community

MoneyGuy · 09-12-2008, 08:55 AM

I read an article on a new computer backup system and am trying to find it again. I'm wondering if anyone knows what this system is. It's supposed to be quick and user friendly. You just plug it into your USB port and it backs up your system. Cost was low, maybe a couple hundred dollars. The article said that the fellow who designed it sold his company to develop and market this product. Don't know if it's Canadian. Does anyone know what this is and where I can find out about it???

metal_geek · 09-12-2008, 09:14 AM

Not sure what they are talking about, some of the External HD's have one touch button backup.

One company I set up wanted to take daily backups of data with them when they left the building. I set up one of the one touch USB drives so they plugged it in, pushed the button, waited and took the data home..

http://www.maxtor.com/en/hard-drive-...ch-4-plus.html

Buy it here in the city...
http://www.memoryexpress.com/Product...19600(ME).aspx

500GB is 134
750GB is 184

Beefcake · 09-12-2008, 09:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by metal_geek

Buy it here in the city...
http://www.memoryexpress.com/Product...19600(ME).aspx

500GB is 134
750GB is 184

I've got one of these. It is really easy to use.

If you have some cash to spend and want dual-redundancy, look at a Drobo:

http://www.drobo.com/
http://www.memoryexpress.com/Product...21524(ME).aspx

MoneyGuy · 09-12-2008, 09:41 AM

Neither of those looks like the one I was reading about. I'll find the article and will post details here. Meanwhile, I welcome the discussion about backup systems. I need one and want one that I can do myself that's quick and easy. Here's another question: There is a guy who is trying to sell me a backup service where they charge a fee for Internet backup. It's $8 a month for X GB.

metal_geek · 09-12-2008, 11:25 AM

Remote backup is great, especially automated stuff.

Imagin you have local data and have a fire in your computer room and your computer and Backup drive get destroyed.

Offsite has it's issues with, transfer speed, and amount of Data. If you have 10GB of data that gets backed up daily, you may not have enough time in the day to actually TRANSFER that data.. The backup scheme also matters, in that do you have 1 copy of the data, do they backup your copy and archive for you?.. If they do how long does it take and is there a fee for recovery?

Simplest way is "1 button" backup to an external HD

More complicated but inexpensive and flexable is set up a setup with a friend and you do each others off site backup.

Less complicated but more expensive is offsite backup service.

If you have very little data to back up and want "off" site backup I heard of a guy that would back up his data to a DVD, and drop it in the "regular" post mail to another house. Was fast.. only cost him a few dollars a month and he had an easy archived record. Worst case senerio the guy had to wait for the mail to show up should his house burn down or computer blow up.....

photon · 09-12-2008, 11:30 AM

I agree with metal_geek, it's cool but transfer speed and amount of data can be a problem.

Amazon's S3 is probably the best one to look at if you really want your data to be safe; other companies I'm not sure how long they've been around or what would happen if they decided to close shop. And nice thing for Amazon is you only pay for what you use (transfer and storage wise), rather than for what you might use.

Personally I have a small server with mirrored drives as a network drive and do backups to there. I currently don't have something for offsite so if my house burns down or something then I don't have a good solution. That's one of my immediate goals.

photon · 09-12-2008, 12:26 PM

Usually an external HDD is as simple as plug and play. Usually you can get them in either USB or eSATA. USB is pretty slow and transferring large files does take a lot of time, but of course once they're there then it's not that big a deal.

eSATA is faster as it uses the same interface that newer computers use for their main hard drives (SATA), but not all computers come with an eSATA port on them. You can also buy an eSATA add-in card.

Most external HDDs are USB only, and the few that are eSATA usually support USB as well.

You can use the drive in any way you want (backup and storage), usually when doing backup activities it just puts the files in a special format in a specific place. As to the size it depends on the software, some backup software will compress the files while copying them over, but the biggest files (media files like images and porn movies aren't very compressable so it's of questionable value.

So if you have a 250GB main drive, get a 500GB external drive and then you can do a full backup and still double your storage.

metal_geek · 09-12-2008, 02:27 PM

Network enabled ones are convient as well, because you don't have to have your computer on to access it if you are sharing the space, but they are slower again then USB ones.

photon · 09-12-2008, 02:35 PM

Actually my DNS-323 is pretty quick, not eSATA fast as fast as a USB drive for sure. In theory if the NAS has enough processing power and a gigabit port it should be close to native drive speed, but not for the few hundred bucks for the one I've got.

metal_geek · 09-12-2008, 02:43 PM

I have the 323 as well, and it works faster USB then over the network for me.

could be any number of reasons maybe it's just in my head... just found the USB to be faster..

Bobblehead · 09-12-2008, 02:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by photon

Actually my DNS-323 is pretty quick, not eSATA fast as fast as a USB drive for sure. In theory if the NAS has enough processing power and a gigabit port it should be close to native drive speed, but not for the few hundred bucks for the one I've got.

It is actually on sale at NCIX right now, I was looking at it earlier today.

So it is a decent unit?

photon · 09-12-2008, 03:00 PM

I do have my network all Gigabit, but that shouldn't be a big difference.. I get maybe 20MB/s with it. Mind you I've never used that particular drive as a USB drive so it could be faster than the other HDDs I've used USB.

It's decent for the price, I sometimes wish for more server like features and faster transfer rates, but I had a full server for a while and the power draw made me switch to this, when it spins the drives down it draws very little power.

Just be careful what drives you buy for it, it's very picky apparently, I've had random drives work and not work in it.

The newest update added a bittorrent client into it too which is cool, but I haven't played with that yet.

There's even hacked firmware out there so you can run a shell on it and do fun stuff with it.

metal_geek · 09-12-2008, 03:04 PM

I like it too, decent for the price and home use.

Bobblehead · 09-12-2008, 03:31 PM

It has a USB print server port. Sweet.

And how do you guys have it set up - RAID 0/1/JBOD ?

$200 (including a 500GB drive) a decent price?

Edit: one more question - is it noisy? Would replacing the fan with a quiet fan be beneficial?

metal_geek · 09-12-2008, 03:46 PM

I have it raid 1 which is a little slower but, doesn't really explain why it "seems" faster over USB...

I think the noise has more to do with the HD's you have then the Fans.. Mine is not close to me most of the time so I don't really pay attention.. Tends to get warm with 2 HD's in there..

As Proton mentioned the software hacks add alot of cool features..

200 with a 500GB hd is a fair price for sure...

And to keep it on topic, you can use this device, with microsoft ROBOCOPY(free) to make a VERY easy, powerful, and efficient back up. It's really easy to create an schedule a task that will automatically Mirror your data to the external drive..

you could also use microsoft Synctoy 2.0 but I prefer the command line one myself...

Bobblehead · 09-12-2008, 03:56 PM

Thanks for the info.

And, to keep this on topic, according to the specs this unit comes with backup software for scheduling backups.

metal_geek · 09-12-2008, 03:58 PM

No idea what software it comes with... I just ripped it outta the box and never paid attention to what CD's came with it

Bobblehead · 09-12-2008, 04:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by metal_geek

No idea what software it comes with... I just ripped it outta the box and never paid attention to what CD's came with it

Quote:

The Memeo Autobackup™ software is also included. You can backup valuable files from a computer to the DNS-323 in real-time, manually or on a schedule. Real-time backups are a great way to safeguard against unfortunate accidents that may result in the loss of precious files.

photon · 09-12-2008, 04:01 PM

I have RAID 1 as well, data security was my goal with this.

Not sure about noise, it's sitting in the wiring closet area in my basement.

Free software?! Didn't come with mine, but I got mine quite a while back. Wonder if I can download it...

metal_geek · 09-12-2008, 04:12 PM

[quote=fotze;1429998]Thanks photon. Its just a laptop with 70GB harddrive that has lasted us for many years but the new HD Camcorder is a memory hog. I will just USB it.

How is this one on sale at mem express?

http://www.memoryexpress.com/Product...spx[/quote]

Never used that one before, but if you are just gonna USB it, make sure you have a USB2 port on your computer or you may as well get a cheapy cause the fancy speed is not gonna be there. Unless you have a firewire port, some older laptops have thoes, then that works basically the same as the USB2...

I don't think the one above includes a HD either so keep that in mind, you'd have to add another 70-80.00 to the price..