On Sun, 19 Apr 2009 07:45:14 +0100, LR <lrme@privacy.net> wrote:

>We have been using a couple of freecom 500GB drives
><http://www.freecom.com/ecproduct_detail.asp?ID=3402&CatID=&sCatID=>
>which we use as storage for up to six people rather than system backups

It's "only" 100Mbits/sec on the ethernet port. The SATA drive is
probably 3Gbits/sec. With a gigabit interface, you can go much
faster. I've been benchmarking my backups and simply copies across
the network. In my never humble opinion, gigabit ethernet is a
definite requirement.

Ummm... don't forget to backup your backup. I use two NAS boxes. The
2nd box is replicated from the first. I haven't found anything I like
yet. I'm doing compressed image backups of the main NAS server, but
have not found any software or company that makes me feel safe.

>and I was hoping I could either use one of these on the USB port or use
>our portable USB drive as I don't wish to add a switch to the network,
>having only 3 ethernet ports is annoying.

Add the switch but remember that the bottleneck will be the
100Mbit/sec ethernet at the NAS drive. If all your traffic shares a
common cable or port, it's a bottleneck.

>We have recently been given a
>320GB USB drive which now contains backup's for the windows machines
><http://www.goclickfree.com/products_portablebackup.php>
>but I haven't had a good play with it yet.

Nothing wonderful about those drives. I can't tell if they're FAT32
or NTFS. The latest fad in backups is to backup by file type. Most
vendors have added that feature. For example, the Arcsoft TotalBackup
software that came with the Simpletech drive will do that:
<http://www.arcsoft.com/products/totalmediabackup/>
The catch is that most of these products are totally useless for
backing up the entire drive and getting literally everything. That's
what I want. I want to be able to restore a machine to its original
condition without missing anything. Sure, I have to deal with big
bloated files and useless garbage, but that's the price of image
backups. Besides getting everything, image backups are also much
faster than file by file. One image backup program I've bought and
tried 1.5GBytes/minute to a USB2 drive.




--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558