mini portable data center

After years of messing with hords of cable mess and big bulky computer cases, I finally decided to clean up. This combined with the fact that a few months ago one of my hard drives crashed and I lost some pictures, I realized that I needed to get a solution and get it quick. After hearing about a few companies building "portable data centers" in shipping containers, I thought I might apply the same idea to a much smaller scale that a poor college student can afford.

One of sun mircosystems portable data centers:











Initial Project Scope:

-Large enough to contain all equipment, but small enough to be "portable" (fit in the trunk of a sedan?)
-One "box" with only two cables coming out, Power and Ethernet
-Uninterrupted power
-Physically Secure (can be locked)

With these specifications in mind, I ended up buying a toolbox with wheels from lowes hardware store. It looks something like this:
I picked up two small used UPS units at the byu computer surplus sale, and an old laptop from my new roomate (i still have to pay him). I installed the latest ubuntu distro, and plugged in my 750gig and 500gig hard drives. I had some trouble with rsync not liking the ntfs partitions that my hard drives had, so I had to re-format them to ext3. I added a nice crontab to have the data synced from one drive to another each night.

I had looked into a program called FlyBack, which is bascially a python written GUI that is designed similar to Time Machine for leopard. It was nice and slick, but didn't allow the freedom that comes from writing your own stuff to cron, so I didn't use it.

My crontab:
0 3 * * * rsync -a -r --delete /media/usb0/data/ /media/usb1/data

(i had to install a package called "usbmount" for the usb drives to auto-mount upon booting)


After getting all the logistics working I put all the pieces inside the toolbox, cutting a few necessary holes in the back. One problem I ran into was overheating. The hard drives were getting pretty warm. I fixed this by temporarily moving the hot drive into the lower well ventilated section. I might have to add some fans at some point.

All in all it turned out very well. It does the job, and does it well. I'd like to add more hard drives for increased snapshot redundency. For the most part this thing was a hackjob, and requires computer nerd skills to get working. If you have enough money, and you already own a Mac with Leopard installed, I would recommend getting the product "Time Capsule". It's really the best thing since sliced bread, and so easy even a caveman can use it.
Whatever you end up getting, you should get something. Because if you aren't backing up your data now then chances are you WILL lose it. Buy an external hard drive, burn dvds, do whatever it takes. Just make sure you have more than one copy, in more than one place. That way if your house burns down or your hard drive crashes you don't lose all those pictures, mp3s, or whatever ones and zeros you hold precious.