[BackupPC-users] My thoughts on building an inexpensive backuppc server.

[Nicholas M. <ni...@mi...>]

For the past couple years I have been constantly researching for a way  
to create an inexpensive backup server that gives at least 1TB in full  
RAID 1 redundancy while keeping $/GB as low as possible.  I am  
targeting this deployment for something that i would use in a home or  
small business where the users could help themselves to restoring  
files (which backuppc does well) and could assist with offsite  
rotations by using additional external USB drives.    I have tried  
this w/ other low power small form factor machines but in the past i  
found that they did not have enough driver support or bus speed to  
keep up at an acceptable rate.

Recently, i came across an article on the web where someone created a  
$200 pc... Using this article as a starting point I think that i am  
getting closer to what i want to do:
<http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/01/25/diy-200-dollar-pc>

Starting with the hardware he suggests in the article, I plan to  
substitute his drives for larger drives in a software RAID1  
configuration we have:

Intel BLKD201GLY2 Motherboard + CPU - $70
1GB Kingston Value Ram - @20
APEX MI-100 Case w/ power supply - $56 (or any case that holds 2  
drives).
Two (2) WD 1TB drives.. WD10EACS -- $240each, $480.
Install your favorite flavor of linux with backuppc (CentOS, Fedora,  
Ubuntu, Debian) but install a stripped down version w/o the gui and  
the like.

Adding up the $ before tax and shipping yeilds: $626  or roughly  
$0.62 / GB in RAID 1 using linux software raid or LVM.

Some other thoughts:
I am aware that this is not going to be the fastest box out there, but  
you already know that is not what i am going for.
Possibly add an inexpensive PCI Gigabit Card for faster transfer speeds.
or add a Raid Card to support 5+ drives in a RAID 6 setup to increase  
storage to 4TB+ (w/ a bigger case)
Im not a fan of WD hard drives as i have had many fail on me... But  
these happened to be the best bang for the buck at the time of writing  
this email.  I would probably spend a bit more on drives I know that  
would last longer.

I am curious if anyone had some ideas , feedback, or has tried to  
create something similar.     If i try this i will post some info on  
my findings in terms of performance and my total experience with  
setting this type of system up.

Thanks in advance.

-N

ps:  My benchmark is a P2-450 w/ 512MB RAM and 3x500GB SATA drives in  
a software RAID 5 config running under debian.  Backuppc runs quite  
well on this machine and backs up 4 linux servers  and 2 windows  
servers in less than 8 hours at night.  There is probably 3TB of data  
total across all the machines, and after compression and pooling it  
comes to around 5-600GB).  This system has been rock solid and has  
been in production for quite some time now.   I run rsyncd on the  
linux boxes and use SMB for the windows servers.    This machine is  
only part of my total backup plan.  It exists to provide users the  
ability to restore files on their own, or if they need to pull an  
older revision.