I’ve been working to make sure my business systems meet my expectations (at least from an IT perspective) and I’ve been slowly making some improvements. The latest enhancements included getting some 3TB drives for local backups and a third NAS to do remote replication.
The new drives are SATA III and my old dock didn’t support that, it was a cheap upgrade. And 3TB drives for just over $40 / TB is a steal. So some new drives and a new dock. I took a bit of fussing to get the NAS to recognize the drives and so I spent some time in root access mode making mods to the linux OS until I got it right. A new backup has been running for much of the day, I expect it will be done by the morning and then incremental backups will kick in again. It’s been a couple of months since I’ve been able to do a full backup, the upgrade in NAS capacity blew my backup model out of the water.
I’m not satisfied with that though, it’s too error prone for getting off-site copies of critical data (it relies on me remembering to do something manual and actually doing it). So today I got a 3rd NAS which is identical to the second one; a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ V2. I only have 2 drives installed in it so with the x-RAID 2 enabled it’s only 3TB of available storage. That will do for a few months though and I have 2 additional bays so I can increase it to match the primary NV+.
I’m preparing #2 to begin async replication tomorrow. When the two NAS are in sync I’ll move the new one off-site and enable remote replication over a VPN. That, coupled with versioned snapshots to a set of USB drives, should keep me going for a few years.
It felt good to put the IT hat on again for a little while and come up with my operational model, implement the design, troubleshoot a little and see it in action. Maybe because I was doing it for myself…
 |
| Two ReadyNAS NV+ V2 and a USB dock |
An update: I’m getting ready to head to the States tomorrow and will be there a couple of times within a month so I’m activating my wifi. Seems I’ll be heading to BestBuy to upgrade to a 4G device, they have them on sale for 1/2 price. Here’s my minor detour to enable this additional upgrade : )
