Romir

I've been using doing a weekly wake-on-lan rsync over ssh (whew!) of /mnt/user. That sounded a lot more complicated than it is. It's just one rsync command once SSH is installed. This gives me a small window to recover any potential accidental data loss and more confidence when moving data around on the live server. It's a peace of mind thing, except for the extra worrying about theft. I've been trialing Crashplan, with all that free space, and its been going well so far. I appreciate having true backups of deleted files for X days and not only a mirror that would also duplicate unwanted changes.

Oops, I didn't explain the second Norco's use. It duplicates the other two servers data and eventually is going to be half a mile away, with another 54g wireless link bridging the locations. It originally was going to be stored in one of the business's backrooms, but that sites metal siding where the wireless CPE is attached to plays havoc with the signal. That connection had to be set to 11b speeds to keep it 100% reliable. A perfect 54g signal is only good for 9gb an hour. 11g, lets not go there... The other hold up was finding a smart differential backup solution with encryption. Crashplan+ seems to have been working well for this purpose.

20x 1TB WD10EADS in the right Norco + 1 spare. (X7SBE with 2 AOC-SAT2 controllers) 10x 2TB WD20EADS in the left Norco (C2SBA+II with 2 1430SA,1 Sil x1 2 port controller, and an unused 4 port Sil PCI controller) The new AOC-SASLP-MV8 support will perfect this build, but more than 16 drives won't be needed for a long time. The Chenbro mini-itx sever hosts VMs and applications on 4 WD20EADS drives and a Vertex ssd. Daily WHS + Crashplan, and monthly Acronis backups of 6-8 systems from three buildings are the primary data stored on it. The 2TB drives (Christmas cashback sale) were purchased to replace most of the 1TB drives (10 from a black friday sale), but I still haven't sold them and re-balanced the two systems. I should take two 2tbs from the Chenbro, put 6 2TBs in each Norco, and then sell all the 1TBs. That will leave a ton of bays for expansion going forward at cheaper prices per gigabyte. Although, I'm really happy right now not constantly thinking about storage to be honest. These builds were were the culmination of two years of tinkering. It's nice to be "done".

I used the windows version to monitor my netbook domain server's head parking totals. It was happening 6 times a minute, 60,000 times a week, so I ended up disabling that with smartctl. The power usage went up 1w to ... 6w total, with gigabit and 2gb of ram!