My boss is always concerned about the risk of data loss, so he's spending $texas++ on some Time Warner product that backs up certain files over the internet and stores them on TW's servers. It's slow, time-consuming and uber-expensive.

I was originally just going to grab a regular USB2/Firewire enclosure and throw a drive in it, but we've got 2 computers to back up and I was looking at options for a network-capable drive enclosure.

The only real requirement is that it work in a multi-OS environment (so Netgear's SC101 is out). Backups are small - mostly just email, Quickbooks, and tons upon tons of Word files and Excel spreadsheets. I'll probably grab a copy of Retrospect to handle the automation.

Any suggestions?

1/2/2006 3:51:25 PM

You want the Linksys NSLU2. It runs Linux and does SMB file sharing via ethernet, which Windows, Linux, and OS X all support by default. Its also easy to hack to support any other number of protocols, like FTP, HTTP, NFS, etc etc.

All you need is it and a USB drive of your choice. Nice and simple.

http://www.batbox.org/nslu2-linux.html (Guide for hacking it if needed)

[Edited on January 2, 2006 at 8:33 PM. Reason : .]

1/2/2006 8:32:13 PM

^
nice, that actually looked like exactly what I wanted...

...but then I saw the Linksys EFG120

Any experience with that one? It's more expensive, but I prefer the one enclosure / one power supply / etc...esp when I'm not paying for it

1/2/2006 8:48:21 PM

why not just buy/build a computer with a raid 0 array running samba?

1/2/2006 8:54:37 PM

^
Primarily b/c that'd be more time than I'm willing to spend on it, but also b/c I need something he'll be able to use when I'm gone w/o worrying about troubleshooting.

The entire business is only a 2-man operation and he's not particularly strong on technology yet (e.g. today he had 35 email windows open in Outlook b/c he thought hitting the red 'x' in the corner would delete them )

[Edited on January 2, 2006 at 9:06 PM. Reason : ---]

1/2/2006 9:06:37 PM

btw, there are like 15-20 products out there now that run SMB through linux. If you want hackability at a low price, the Linksys is definitely one of the top contenders.

But there are several other products that are easier to configure with a lot bigger base feature set (but also 1.5-2x what the linksys costs up front).

Toms Hardware has actually kept a pretty good review list of NAS products.

1/3/2006 12:11:18 AM