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Archiver > TMG > 2003-04 > 1049218152


From: Joe Makowiec <>
Subject: [TMG] Re: OT Back ups first
Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2003 12:29:12 -0500
References: <000301c2f860$f419b6f0$4302a8c0@Cheasa>
In-Reply-To: <3E89B534.32232851@infoave.net>


At 09:50 AM 4-1-2003 -0600, Richard Brogger wrote:
>For a long time I have wanted to bury a concrete box in the hillside
>where it would have good drainage and ventilation. I would run power
>and LAN cable underground to that box and put an old computer with a
>large hard drive in it. My software will automatically backup every
>changed file to that hard drive.
>
>As long as I have vents in the box, the heat from the computer should
>carry excess humidity out of the box. Does anyone see any problems
>with such a system?

Interesting system. I can see a couple of (minor) problems:
1) You should probably have a UPS with the system, to avoid having to go
out in bad weather to reboot it. Depending on how power is in your area
and the power draw of your system, it wouldn't require a big or expensive
one. On The Other Hand, a relatively fancier one which will communicate
with the OS and force an orderly shutdown in the event the UPS runs down
might be worthwhile.
2) Make sure that the OS is something relatively easily updateable remotely
- Win2K, WinXP, various flavors of Linux. My personal opinion is that the
way to avoid technological obsolescence of backups is to keep rolling them
over on a *nix -hosted hard drive. That won't avoid file-format
obsolescence, but if you keep a text version (eg gedcom) of your data in
addition to the binary version(s), you should be OK.
3) Look into gigabit ethernet for this connection. Running gigabit, you
may be able to use mapped drives on the remote box as quickly as using a
local drive.
4) Maybe use a couple of ethernet cards and lines for redundancy.
5) Watch your distance. 100BaseT and 1000BaseT have a limit of 100 meters.

Joe
--
Joe Makowiec can be reached at:
http://makowiec.org/contact/?Joe
http://makowiec.org/

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