Home Server died, options?

Hammer80 · June 2014

Ok my Home Server that has been running 24x7 for the past 7 years died. I store all my family data on it and then back it up to CrashPlan. It appears that the hard drives are good and it was just the power supply that gave up.

Here is my dilemma, I need 500gb worth of storage and it has to be easily accessible, low maintenance and secure. I am trying to figure out what is a better option, replace the server with another one or replace the power supply and continue to backup to CrashPlan or do i go with Encrypted Cloud Storage. Thoughts and Options?

MrJimbo19 · June 2014

Depending on the importance of the data you may find it most effective to replace the power supply. You can then determine a best course of action on how to proceed with either replacing the box entirely or just use it till it blows up. I like crashplan because it is cheap, I do not like crashplan because it is slow to download your data in a disaster situation, I have found on the ground backups to be the best for recovery time.

If all you are using it for is accessible storage on a network you could also consider picking up a NAS and using that in place of the server. would probably end up being lower power consumption and smaller then the server you are currently using. Good luck either way!

lsud00d · June 2014

I agree with @MrJimbo19, why don't you just replace the power supply?? They are relatively inexpensive and easy to replace.

I would add a NAS to the mix and you have your server back + storage redundancy.

tpatt100 · June 2014

500 GB is almost nothing when looking at the price per GB drives 2TB and up. I would just replace the power supply since you are already using CrashPlan as an off site backup. I setup a media server for streaming movies/TV to my Apple TV/Fire TV-XBMC.

My movie files take up a large amount of space, I am trying out a third party drive pooling program but seems they are having issues with Windows 8 VSS (Volume Snapshot Service) just seems to be more hassle than it is worth. I was thinking of trying out an open source NAS but not sure resilience is worth losing so much hard drive space if I wanted to use all of my drives. I tried FlexRaid out but again VSS has issues with it's drive pooling.

If your router supports external drives, it's almost easier and better to just connect a big external drive off of it and setup a syncing of directories with your main PC and let CrashPlan back that up.

I am probably going back to Windows 8's File History because that was pretty fast, efficient secondary backup.

Bryzey · June 2014

I run a Synology NAS with a 4tb hdd. Stores all of my home network data and I map the nas drive on my TV/raspberry pi xbmc to watch the content. Works perfectly.

So long as you have crash plan or bit torrent sync or carbonite or some form of off site backup you can pick up a cheap 1-2 Bay nas. Unless you actually use the server for something other than storage if recommend that.

iBrokeIT · June 2014

I love my QNAP NAS. Extremely stable, very fast and lots of apps (Google Drive, Dropbox and Amazon S3). Google Drive is $2/mo for 100 GB or $10/mo for 1 TB - very hard to beat that price.

Hammer80 · June 2014

Are there any NAS appliances that have the ability to backup to BitCasa automatically?

tpatt100 · June 2014

I never heard of Bitcasa so not sure, I see DropBox plugins sometimes for other devices. I would just worry about the plug ins breaking with some update on the cloud side of things since the plugins aren't always official plugins. Installing the cloud client on your PC and setting up a sync with a folder on your NAS would probably be an easy work around.

My wife always forgets to back up her pictures on her phone to the laptop. Even though it does it to iCloud I wanted local backups rather than just phone->cloud. So I installed Dropbox on my media box, put her account on it and I put a reminder on her calendar to open Dropbox on her phone every Saturday so it can upload and then download to the media box.

W Stewart · June 2014

You need a server with redundant power supplies. I hope you have raid too.

MTciscoguy · June 2014

I run a small device hooked up to my router called Zonet, very small inexpensive device, it allows me to hook up a drive to my router and is a NAS. What type of server do you have, if it is just a standard type computer case, then I would just replace the power supply, good quality power supplies are not that expensive these days. I use Dell poweredge servers here at home and they have redundant power supplies, so I don't have to worry to much.

Kinet1c · June 2014

I'm running a HP microserver at home, nothing important on it though.

jibbajabba · June 2014

I went a bit OTT .. I agreed to save my parent's files so I have a microserver which stores it, the folder is also synced to dropbox .. the same folder is synced to another server via owncloud (opensource dropbox for self-install).

Home Server died, options?

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