> The list, perhaps because it lacks any sort of rating system, > definitely has a high ratio of hecklers around. Every time someone > brings up a good point, 3 others jump in and opine, completely > obfuscating the issue. Then there are the 3-4 people who jump into > _every_ thread as if they know all about it. Or maybe they're the > same, I dunno. > > I avoided joining this topic because it was obvious from the beginning > the OP was asking about a specific setup that I had no experience > with. But predictably, the usual suspects hopped right in and started > espousing opinions on a wide variety of things, most completely > irrelevant to the OP's setup, and many so far off topic the poor guy > has no hope of ever solving his problem.
I went back and reviewed the answers again and David got his answer in the subsequent posts. But, we don't know his budget, so the specific answer isn't available. In the end, your budget is going to determine what solutions are available to you. The amount of data he is talking about is almost trivial WRT modern storage technology. <100 GB should just be left online and simply purchase a larger NAS to deal with storage issues and have a reliable backup/disaster recovery system in place to augment. I purchased this year a 5 TB NAS from Dell for about $5,000 (there are smaller and less expensive options). We also had a 700 GB file server, which was filling up rapidly. It's very simple to set up and uses SATA drives and runs on Windows Storage Server 2003. SAS would be better, but the capacity was lower and at a significantly higher cost. I was tired of the file server shuffle (we've had 3 in the past 6 years, all filling up within 2 years) and scaled out as large as we could afford. We still have 3.2 TB available. Ideally, this would be supplemented by a middle tier of disk-disk backup. I'd like to purchase a data protection server that takes hourly snapshots of all the local servers, including bare-metal backups, but that hasn't happened yet. That would allow very rapid recovery from significant data loss. The tape backup unit would then backup from the DP server to be archived off-site. WSS 2003 has a nice feature called single instance storage, which only stores one copy of duplicate files, with pointers to the file in the duplicate locations. That has shaved a couple gigs off of our storage needs. It also uses the Windows shadow copy service, which takes periodic snapshots of the data and stores the snapshots on a separate volume. The snapshots are a small fraction in size of the original files. I do these snapshots at 10 AM, 2 PM and 6 PM. Instead of IT digging through the tapes, staff can quickly recover deleted or overwritten files and folders using this. Verrrry nice, very simple to use and it has virtually eliminated the need to retrieve tapes from off-site to correct for the goofy-finger delete or the palm-to-the-face overwrite. I don't have to pay extra for the tapes to be delivered before they come back in on rotation and the staff doesn't have to wait days or weeks to get their files back. Oh yeah, and the NAS uses RAID 5. Gasp! ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
