Subtle Rantings

With the wife and I acquiring more digital matter (as I’m sure everyone is), I am wanting to move away from my antiquated, albeit functional, FreeBSD file server. Currently, I am running FreeBSD on three boxes. One box is the main file server that anyone on my network can access. The other two boxes serve as backup systems for the primary file server. Through a variety of rsync scripts, I have a very redundant system of storage that has served me very well over the past few years.

To give you an idea of my existing configuration, I have two main partitions on my file server. One is for my MP3 music collection, and the other is for anything else (documents, archived programs, email backups, etc). I wanted to create a system that would be easy to use, but at the same time impervious to a number of attacks or disasters.

I have one script that runs every 15 minutes on the 2 backup servers. This script does a differential rsync on the main file server to see if any new files were added. This rsync does not delete anything. This means, I’ve created an environment where there is only a 15 minute window of vulnerability. For example, I just created my budget for 2008 and I save it to the file server. If the file server were to die BEFORE that rsync script runs every quarter hour, I would lose that file. However, no files that had already been backed up during the last 15 minute script execution would be lost. As you can see, this is MUCH better than a daily backup routine.

Here’s the coolest feature of my design in my opinion. Since I am syncing the backup servers with the main file servers every 15 minutes, what if I got a virus on my machine that started deleting everything on my local and networked drives? Or what if I accidentally deleted an entire folder that I didn’t meant to? That’s OK. Here’s why: Whenever I delete something on the main file server, it is indeed deleted from that server. However, the deleted item(s) still exists on the backup servers. You may remember me saying earlier how my rsync script only copies new items and doesn’t delete anything. Once a week I run a “cleanup” script that goes through and compares the backup server filesystem with the main file server and will delete items that no longer exist on the main server. This protects me from any worm or trojan outbreak that may occur on my network.

The only way I lose all my data is in a house fire or some other locally physical event. How’s that for redundancy?

While my current setup has served me well and flawlessly, I’m ready to move to a NAS. I want something that has a much smaller footprint, less power requirements, and a more standardized implementation. So I need someone to recommend a NAS to me. Here are my requirements in order of importance:

• Supports RAID 5
• Network Attached (duh)
• Relatively fast
• Web GUI as well as Shell Access

Any ideas?

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