Hardware question

Dr4gul4

Was asked to come up with a solution for the following, of course the "cheapest" solution is required.

Office with 2 MAc's and 1 pc, 1 Eircom provided DSL router, 1 colour printer and 1 b/w printer.

all pc's/Mac's are wireless, and the colour printer is connected to the router. the mac's can print perfectly to this.

the B/W printer is connected locally to the Pc.


Overall they want the following.

1 central location for document storage, and a backup solution, also they need to have the ability for all 3 machines to access the data, and printers.

So originally i though a NAS shoudl do the job, but that leaves me short on the Backup solution.

As for the data, We would be backing up any where from 50 to 100 GB of data.

any one got any bright cost saving idea's ?

Ghost Train

Given that the machines will be on when backing up, can say one of the pcs always be on and act as the server. For three pcs it's probably not worth having a nas or dedicated server. As long as backups are done when the server pc isn't in use, would it's performance really be degraded too much by general file serving to two other machines? Going for gigabit ethernet wired setup would probably makes sense too

Don't really know how well pcs/macs network together but can't imagine much problems, as it must be a common setup

woolymammoth

how about buying a very cheap pc and loading it with hard disk space. load on linux and have it act as a file & print server, and backups too, maybe to some external device/extra hard disk/person with photographic memory! the possibilities are endless! it wouldn't even need a monitor or keyboard or anythin!

Dr4gul4

Two fair points,

I had already though about running a SCCI card with an LTO attached of the PC, but it's not really practical, nobody wants that hanging off the pc.

As for the "buy a cheap pc" and run nix on it. yea sure this is an option, but it's the backup side mixed with an LTO drive etc .drivers more complication along with way, and these folks are not Tech savy @ all.

Capt'n Midnight

how many backups do they need , how big is the data set ?

if less than 4GB then DVD's are the way to go

getting external USB drives is another way - you can restore on any machine, and you'd have multiple drives so you don't have the problem and expense when an LTO starts acting the maggot and chewing tapes. yes if you drop a drive it doesn't always work - but the same is true of tape too.

compare the cost of an LTO + full set of tapes with USB drives.

Dr4gul4

Were looking at a min of 100 GB backup's

and in an ideal world nightly full backup's would be the proper way to go.

External Drives ? for backup. not really an option tho ?