Had a PC disaster a few weeks ago that resulted in my main PC being offline for 1 week until I got a replacement BIOS chip. I've been thinking about seriously upgrading my backup infrastructure which at the mo consists of a 500GB external USB drive.

I'm thinking multi-bay eSATA enclosure with hot-swappable drives and NAS would be a bonus. At the mo I've an internal 750GB Seagate Barricuda drive which *will* be hooked up to an eSata with Acronis Ture Image

Has anyone tried this...whats your on and off-line backup solution and have you tried backing up to an FTP server. IE If I bought a server and got the hosting guys to host it etc...

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Peter Knight - Web Designer
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Eden Web - Web Design Ireland Virtual Tour Company Dublin Photographer

I use a Terastation from Buffalo at home - excellent system - 4 SATA drives in Raid 5 giving 1 TB of raw storage in a really reliable format. For crucial stuff, I use an online backup tool from ( Welcome to Ireland's largest Hosting Company - Hosting 365 ) surprisingly enough, that keeps files in sync, encrypts, etc, and is web accessible from anywhere to retrieve files, versions, etc.
Nothing worse than losing data!

You're referring to specific documents here and not a whole drive or bootable disk?

Well, a couple of critical directories of documents / files / databases. The online backup widget does a nightly incremental with incremental versions for a week, a full backup once a week, and weekly versions going back 3 months.

Just out of interest - whya re you using a Raid 5 array. Isn't that striped across 5 disks and what happens if one disk goes down?

Raid 5 requires 3 or more disks, and allows for the failure of one drive (out of three) without any impact. The more drives, the better the redundancy.

But they're not 3 mirrored disks. Surely if one disk goes down then a third of your data is missing. I must be missing something here...looking forward to tha 'AHA!' moment

Standard RAID levels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia explains it well

Essentially, each of the 4 disks contains parity data for all the other disks. If a disk dies, you insert a blank disk, and the array rebuilds the blank disk from the data stored on the remaining 3.

A picture speaks louder:

RAID Explanation

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Aha!
Vantec have a lovely dual bay enclosure coming soon. It's the main header graphic here
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