I’ve been around these parts for a while. I’ve had a many hardware failures resulting in data loss and witnessed it happen to others time and time again. I have come to terms that if you own a hard drive, some where in the future, sooner or later, it will die. If your data disappears with it or not is all dependent on having a backup somewhere.
At the same time I feel I have many friends who haven’t gone through these experiences to learn this hard lessons yet. Technology is cheap, and thusly the creation of valuable content has become easier and easier. Everyone has personal photos and videos that they adore and would break into tears if any of those memories disappeared.
This is where the project comes in. I want to create a simple system of storage for my friends in the bay area to come by and use as an off site backup. This would be space for personal data and not a full system image. The plan would be to run some sort of RAID so the backups would have a hard time failing. After a month since someone’s last backup, I’d send them an email demanding they’d come back and do another, the next day I’d call.
As much as backup solutions within current operating systems are getting better and better. I feel it isn’t enough. You don’t have mom or dad nagging at you to do your backup, nor does it ever tend to be offsite (which is more important then you think). Having something that’ll always be there for you, only a month stale at the most is rather worth while.
It would personally bring me joy to know that many of my friends wouldn’t be going through much of the same heart break I’ve gone through in the past when a drive has died and my data has become lost. Sadly I’ve got two road blocks. First is cost, this isn’t something I’m willing to build from cash out of my own pocket, nor is it something I want to pay the power bill for. The other issue is my current residence could not accommodate such a thing when considering noise and power consumption (I have a hard time as it is running my little Shuttle machine).
Anyone else have any thoughts or comments on this subject?
