My file server went down last week. Lost some data....

[Admiral]

5 bay Synology that backs up to another 5 bay Synology off site is how I set it up.  Easy to use, fast, reliable.  No monthly fees at all either.

[jantexinks]

The major problem with a local server is it doesn't protect against fire, flood, theft, etc. 
Take a look at the "3-2-1" back up plan.

3 Copies of a file
2 Different medias
1 Copy off site

In the grand scheme of things data back up is cheap and relatively easy.  You just have to make a plan and stick to it. 

[GraphicDisorder]

We considered a offsite synology to copy our local one, trouble is we move so much data our ISP (at home) would flag this and not play well with that. 

We have external drives we swap in and out to keep data offsite.

[Racer Tees]

I've been using Dropbox for a few years now and have lost a hard drive during that time. I keep everything synced on multiple computers and Dropbox will sync over lan. Plug both computers into my gigabit router and let them sync up. I think i have about 250gb on there and it doesn't take long.   Plus the fact that I can be working on art on the other computer while the one that was down gets synced back up.

Always have a backup plan. I lost 5 years of customer art once and it's not worth chancing.

[jvanick]

We considered a offsite synology to copy our local one, trouble is we move so much data our ISP (at home) would flag this and not play well with that. 

We have external drives we swap in and out to keep data offsite.

how much data do you modify per day?

you could always 'upgrade' your ISP at home to a 'business' level of service to work around any bandwidth caps.

your first sync should be done locally if possible, as to move a few TB of data would take a REALLY long time... heck, even copying to USB drives moving a few TB of data is worse than watching paint dry.

quote from my old days in IT... Never under-estimate the bandwidth of a station wagon heading down the highway full of tapes. --- Here's how I migrated roughly 50 TB of data a number of years ago.   For comparison, it would have taken roughly 4 months to move that amount of data on a 45mbps T3 pipe.

[GraphicDisorder]

We considered a offsite synology to copy our local one, trouble is we move so much data our ISP (at home) would flag this and not play well with that. 

We have external drives we swap in and out to keep data offsite.

how much data do you modify per day?

you could always 'upgrade' your ISP at home to a 'business' level of service to work around any bandwidth caps.

your first sync should be done locally if possible, as to move a few TB of data would take a REALLY long time... heck, even copying to USB drives moving a few TB of data is worse than watching paint dry.

quote from my old days in IT... Never under-estimate the bandwidth of a station wagon heading down the highway full of tapes. --- Here's how I migrated roughly 50 TB of data a number of years ago.   For comparison, it would have taken roughly 4 months to move that amount of data on a 45mbps T3 pipe.

Gigs are changed / added daily here. You figure Erik here is often creating single files in the 1gb-2gb range. So would kill our home isp quick.  Business line at home might be the ticket though and have considered it for sure.  Of course we'd sync local first before hauling it home. 

[jvanick]

yeah, gigs per day would suck, and would likely be bad on ANY cloud-based backup methodology.  I do have to ask what you're doing with 1-2gb files tho...

man talk about some SLOW opening/saving over a network.

[GraphicDisorder]

yeah, gigs per day would suck, and would likely be bad on ANY cloud-based backup methodology.  I do have to ask what you're doing with 1-2gb files tho...

man talk about some SLOW opening/saving over a network.

Wraps/banners at times get this big. We also have some shirt files get huge like that as we often work much larger than required as customers often will have us take a shirt design and want much much larger items made. Rather than having to redo the artwork we just start large.  Saved so much time over the years.  Doesn't really save disk space though lol.

[jvanick]

I hear ya on the banners... I did one a few weeks back that was a 10' wide x 16' long for a race...

I couldn't deal with working with those files on a regular basis LOL.

you're right those files are HUGE.. I think that one, saved at 300dpi, was like 2.5gb.

[Itsa Little CrOoked]

@ Jvanick  I don't even know what I'm looking at here. Are those tape carts?

I've never seen anything like that. (Plus, 50 terabytes is a TON of data!)

[jvanick]

@ Jvanick  I don't even know what I'm looking at here. Are those tape carts?

I've never seen anything like that. (Plus, 50 terabytes is a TON of data!)

nope, that's a EMC VNX disk array (enterprise class storage) with 8 drive bays chock full of 1tb drives (back when those drives were pricey).  The drives are in a raid5 configuration, so it nets out around 78ish TB of usable disk space (because 1tb isn't really 1tb, parity, and system drives). 

think of having 120 1TB drives in your computer and that's what you're looking at.

Before we were commonly able to get 10GigE circuits like area available now, this is how we would   'seed' new data centers.  Did this process about 4 times over the course of 6 years... just getting the data onto and off of the array was a challenge.  the shipping it half way across the country was easy.

[GraphicDisorder]

One of my good friends is one of the top guys at Charter here in East TN. Got to tour their facility the other day. CRAZY stuff.  Just one of their routers with the license for it was over a million bucks.  It was crazy to think that just that one room controlled all of Tennessee's TV/Internet/Phone.  He even showed me the racks of drives where all the video on demand lives. There was a diesel generator that was as big as some buildings. Ran by Train engine.  Could power the building for months with the buried tanks.