I’ve been meaning to setup a backup server for quite some time now, however it was hard to get around to actually doing it. Until I met the Synology cs-407
. It’s sold as an appliance that has a number of great features: Web interface for configuration, IP Camera integration, iTunes network share, webserver /w php and mysql, and even an embedded bit torrent client.
I packed it full with four 500GB SATA II drives, and with Raid 5 that gives me just under 1.5TB of redundant storage. I can lose up to 1 drive at which point the system will automatically email me if somethings wrong – it will run in degraded mode. I can then power it down, shove a new drive in and power it back up and it will rebuild. I also have a 250GB external drive connected to it via USB to auto-backup the stuff on the raid partition that is especially critical. The reason I do this is because you never know what might happen! Raid 5 is NOT and should not be thought as the end-all solution to data backup.
I’ve got about 500GB spread across a few machines and disks that I’ve been loading onto the storage server, but boy does it take a long time. I’m not running a gigabit network yet so that’s part of the problem. I’m currently at about 141GB copied after HOURS of copying.
The server runs a variant of Debian, so I’m happy to be running linux on this little thing. I can tweak as I need, one of the beauties of open source 
This sounds pretty sweet! The 500GB SATA II drives and Raid 5 was a great choice. I have been wanting to build my own server for sometime now, but my budget hasn’t allowed for it yet. One of these days I will get it done, nice job.
Thanks. It’s been a few weeks now and it’s been rock-solid. My comfort level has definitely increased! The only thing left is to automate backups from my laptop and server boxen.
Update: I have automated everything. I can’t believe I didn’t set this thing up before… what a relief to have it!