I am in the middle of revamping the backups of the servers and shared drives at my non-profit. What I need is a storage solution that will simply give me a place to put the backups. I have two options within my budget :
- Build a simple Debian server with a large chassis and a motherboard that can hold 6-8 drives
- Buy two NAS enclosures (think Drobo/Synology/etc) and hook them up to the backup server via USB3
For information, the backup server is a little box running Bareos. As far as I can tell, aside from the time necessary for the first option, the second would certainly be the easiest. However, I am afraid of having problems down the road that would render the units unusable for X number of weeks (for example, a manufacturer's defect which would force me to get a replacement all of which takes a while usually) and thus kill my backups. At least with a Linux server, I can +/- fix it.
Any thoughts? Is my fear perhaps irrational? In particular, I'd love to hear from folks who have experience with these NAS units in production.
In case you're wondering, I only have about 13 TB of data to backup weekly so performance is not really an issue.
Edit: Thanks for the suggestion about cloud storage. I should just note that for us, it's not an option because we are in a remote location and we only have an ASDL line (3Mbps/768kbps).