Rob Owens wrote at about 11:57:01 -0400 on Monday, October 27, 2008:
 > Jeffrey J. Kosowsky wrote:
 > > What is the alternative if you don't have room on your server and if
 > > you can't "afford" something fancier than a SAN?
 > > For me, using NAS is very economical given the cost of drives and the
 > > existence of cheap embedded Linux NAS devices. Maybe I am missing an
 > > easy better alternative.
 > > 
 > I'm not sure what a NAS costs these days, but my BackupPC server is a
 > white box desktop-class machine with SATA drives in software RAID 1.  It
 > cost me $600.  It runs the server software and stores the backups locally.
 > 
 > You can keep it cheap by using a mini/micro ATX motherboard -- they've
 > usually got onboard video and onboard LAN, and you're not likely to need
 > much in the way of PCI slots.  Just make sure the motherboard has plenty
 > of room for expansion in terms of RAM and hard disks.
 > 

Well I bought a dns-323 for about $130 and got 2 1-TB Seagate drives
for $149 each. So under $450 for a 1TB of RAID-1 backup.
Also it uses only a few watts of power (and even less when the disks
power down since I mount root off of a small surplus usb stick).
Also the dns-323 is extremely well built (metal, solid, not platic)
and small - not much bigger than the 2 drives themselves side-to-side)

But I agree that one could do well also by going the white box way...

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