Small, quiet, low power rsync target

[Stereodude]

I'm potentially looking at building something small, quiet, cheap, & low power machine to sit tucked in a closet or basement as a remote rsync target to serve as an off site backup.

I would want to do RAID-1 with two SATA drives. Beyond that I don't have much preference. I assume some sort of ITX or similar small form factor system would fit the bill, but admittedly I don't know much about 'em.

Any suggestions?

 

[Fushigi]

Shove this in an ITX case. Sample build.

 

[Stereodude]

Interesting... How's the Linux support for the ION chipset?

 

[Fushigi]

nVidia's site doesn't list chipset drivers but they must be out there since Ion-based Linux devices exist.

 

[Stereodude]

It looks like a mini ITX Atom 330 boards + this case + two 2.5" SATA laptop drives might be just the ticket.

I wonder if the newer Pineview Atom CPU would be worth waiting for. :dunno:

 

[LunarMist]

It looks good, but are you sure that you don't want Greg's old computer with all the SCSI drives?

 

[Howell]

Netgear has a bunch of shoebox NASs that support rsync.

Alternatively, have you priced out or even found any online storage services that support rsync.

 

[Stereodude]

I guess I should have clarified. I'm not necessarily stuck on using rsync, but that was my first idea. I want to control my own backup and not use an online service. I also want something more versatile than a basic NAS device. I will probably put the small box in either the closet at work, or perhaps my buddy's basement.

I plan to go with a Zotac ION / Atom 330 ITX mobo, 2 GB of DDR2-800, and two 500GB 5400 2.5" HD's in the Antec ISK 300-65 case. I will probably run some flavor of Linux on it.

 

[MaxBurn]

The new pineview boards offer more horsepower and I think they draw less power than the ion boards and the ion's have a little more video in them with hardware decoding and seem to be slightly more suited to HTPC applications, least that's the impression I got over at anands with their recent articles.

I am pretty much doing the same thing only I am going the home server route or maybe freenas, heck have a xp license here too if I really can't get things working.

Because these things sit in a closet or basement headless I am wanting some sort of remote management and kvm over ip if for when things go wrong and have found one or two of these boards that support IPMI 2 that has that, check out my other thread on this.

 

[Stereodude]

I saw Zotac now has a Pineview based Mini ITX board. I wasn't too impressed by the specs. It lacks gigabit ethernet, "hardware" RAID, and only has 2 SATA ports. The lower power usage and slightly more powerful CPU don't make up for those deficits IMHO.

The Zotac IONITX-D-E probably more computationally powerful than I need anyhow. Oh well...

FWIW, I found Newegg to have the best prices on the HD, RAM, and Zotac board (free shipping on all three too), but the case was about half the price at Buy.com ($61.24 shipped) that it is at Newegg ($114.98 shipped).

 

[Handruin]

What do you plan to do to connect to it remotely? Will you use some kind of dynamic DNS and have a port opened to it for rsync?

 

[Fushigi]

If your workstations are mostly Windows, consider what I did and what MaxBurn mentioned - Windows Home Server. You get automated daily backups (incremental so they're fast), access to shared files over the 'net via "yourserver.homeserver.com" (it uses SSL and you create/manage the IDs), runs headless, doesn't require hardware RAID for redundancy, and storage can be expanded simply. There are a couple of good threads here about it & a complete Atom-based WHS with 1TB HD & OS can be had for under $400.

 

[Stereodude]

What do you plan to do to connect to it remotely? Will you use some kind of dynamic DNS and have a port opened to it for rsync?

At work we have a few unused static public IP addresses, so I could connect it directly to the net though I'm leaning more toward putting it behind our WRT-54GL running Tomato and using port forwarding for some extra security. I haven't quite decided what I will do with it. After I build it and get it running I'll see how it shakes out.

 

[Howell]

If your workstations are mostly Windows, consider what I did and what MaxBurn mentioned - Windows Home Server. You get automated daily backups (incremental so they're fast), access to shared files over the 'net via "yourserver.homeserver.com" (it uses SSL and you create/manage the IDs), runs headless, doesn't require hardware RAID for redundancy, and storage can be expanded simply.

I am curious if WHS supports imaged based backups and file or bare metal restores.

ps. Talking about WHS always cracks me up a little bit as those are my initials.

 

[MaxBurn]

If what I read is true you can do a bare metal restore with the restore boot disk over network (network drivers required if not already loaded) and you can also browse the backup for that one file or two you need. No luck on the image based thing I believe.

 

[Mercutio]

The backups are file based, but WHS will only store a single copy of a file, which means it's efficient for multiple machines for the same version of Windows.

It supports bare metal restore from a boot CD that loads the WHS client.

I'm not as enamored of it as some people are, but being able to buy a $350 system to manage backups for up to 10 PCs certainly does have its place.

 

[Fushigi]

Windows Home Server (to avoid your initials..) uses Volume Shadow Copy to back up only the blocks that changed since the last backup. It does not do traditional image backups that I know of.

Bare Metal restores are easy: Boot off the supplied restore CD, it finds the server, you pick the machine to restore, and it does it. It's something like 4 clicks beginning to end. The only gotcha I've found so far is the target HD must be the same size or larger as the original. The restore CD does allow for you to load NIC drivers but I've not had the need so far. And of course if you're restoring to new hardware Windows will probably ask for reactivation.

For file restores, run the console widget, go to Computers & Backup, select the PC the file was on, select View Backups, and take the option to restore individual files. You can go from any backup it has retained and by default (you can change it) that's everything for 90 days.

Backups run as a background task during a time window you specify (midnight to 6AM is the default). It uses WOL so sleeping machines should still get backed up (although WOL isn't working on my wife's wireless laptop right now). Daily backups take just minutes per machine. The initial full backup will vary depending on how much data there is but it seems to still be fast enough to not worry about and it's still a background task. It does only back up one workstation at a time so if for some reason the time window runs out before the backups are done it will resume the next time (or you can do a manual backup).

The backup catalog is on the server & isn't visible as part of the shared folders so end users can't manipulate them directly, which is good. You can use the console widget to modify backup retention so I suppose if one were to be "evil" they could turn off the backups and delete the copies on the server. But the widget is password-protected. And as I've mention folder duplication before as the way Home Server protects against HD crashes w/o RAID, I don't think it actually does duplication of the backup files, which for me is fine since the backups themselves are dupes.

 

[Fushigi]

I can understand why Merc doesn't like it as much. It's highly Windows-centric - there's no Mac or Linux widgets so you have to use their tools and do whatever passes for network backups, for instance. And most of all it's not designed as an administrator's server. It's designed for average users who are semi-tech literate. It's plug-n-go. There aren't many admin capabilities since it's not presented with techies in mind.

But is does do more than backups. Like a NAS it offers a network share for your docs, music, and videos. The widget will report if any client machine has AV turned off or it is out of date. Files can be securely accessed from the 'net. You can RDP through it from the 'net to any client PC that supports RDP (i.e. non-Home versions). And there are lots of add-ins.

 

[Mercutio]

There's more to it than that. It has all the drawbacks of using a Business/Professional copy of Windows (10 CALs) with basically none of the advantages of Server; single sign-on seems like it would be a no-brainer but it's not there.

There's also nothing to make it back up another storage appliance. Granted, that's a script I can write in my sleep, but it could have been there, and having a script like that would go a long way to providing support for Linux and OSX as well.

Have they gotten around to enabling Libraries support for Win7 on WHS yet? Because that's something else that I was surprised was absent (I'm also surprised and annoyed that it isn't available on pre-R2 Server 2008, but it's not).

WHS is just a cut down Windows Server. I can install programs on it over remote desktop, and they load and work, but it's kind of crappy that I have to do that when the underlying hardware really could handle a keyboard, mouse and display. The non-RDP administrative interface is kind of lame, too.