Re: [tlug] White Box: Some Assembly Required ...

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2018-07-02 03:34 +0900 (Mon), CL wrote:

> As noted from the beginning, this machine is nothing fancy and
> nothing I'd want to bring close to my work PCs....
> 
> If this works out well, I will use it as the blueprint to build a
> larger home-office machine, using top quality server-grade hardware
> instead of the "not commercial" level of the current hardware.

Ah, the irony. :-) Remember 'RAID' is an acronym for 'Redundant Array
of Inexpensive Disks,' and the whole point behind it was to move away
from using 'top quality server-grade hardware' to avoid failures and
instead buy cheap hardware and handle the failures. Google many years
ago took this to the logical extreme and filled their data centers
with cheap consumer PCs and disks. They failed regularly, but they'd
just leave the failed machines there until enough time had passed that
even the working one weren't worth keeping any more (because old and
slow) and then just replace the whole lot of them in one swipe.

This is an approach you should consider. Two cheap machines that sync
with each other, especially if you can put them in well-separated
buildings, will provide more reliability than one expensive machine
simply because there are plenty of data-destruction events that the
expensive machines protect against no better than the cheap ones.

If you need serious protection against data loss, adding cloud storage
to this is not cheap compared to just cheap PCs, but is still far
cheaper than any other option for that level of reliability. Look at
something like AWS Storage Gateway[1] for one convenient way to handle
this.

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/

That said, it sounds as if you may have a relatively small amount of
data for this application, in which case something like Dropbox and
several single external drives attached to various PCs might do the
trick for you and be easiest to use. If you can live with 1 TB of
storage, you're looking at about $100/year. Unfortunately Dropbox goes
up rapidly from there since you have to move to a business account
with a minimum of three users: ¥45,000/year for 2 TB or ¥72,000/year
for 'unlimited' storage.

The one thing to remember with things like Dropbox (and possibly
anything else, for that matter) is that you want an offline drive you
update regularly only when you've confirmed that all data are intact,
to protect against accidental deletions on your cloud storage followed
by sync'ing of those deletions to all your online drives. Cloud
services offer an 'undelete' function, of course, but I suspect that
there are still situations where undelete may not be able to recover
things.

cjs
-- 
Curt J. Sampson      <cjs@example.com>      +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch