What is the best homeserver setup right now?

No, there are many reasons to get a home server other than data backup. E.g., file serving, media center serving, printer sharing, web serving, account authentication, etc.

Furthermore, home servers typically do not provide a high level of data security since they tend to be both online and on-site.

 

Well, the default reason for them to be online is data access for you, that's it.

Data Security - all the file servers are on site in most companies, universities, so that doesn't hold.

Its supposed to offer data security in the form of redundancy - and it beats single HDDs.

 

i personally hate leaving machines on - excess wear on various parts plus the electric bill. i dont have a need to stream media - i have all my music and movies on my laptop w/1TB storage. almost all of my files on that laptop (movies, pictures, videos, etc) is backed up onto my 750gb western digital mybook like once every couple of weeks or so. my media doesnt change that frequently so it works for me. this way, my data is always on 2 drives -my external hard drive and on my laptop. that's the type of redundancy that i can live with

if i do wind up getting a PC with a ton of storage, i'll probably turn that unit on, map a drive from my laptop, copy over all my media and when that's done, i'd turn the pc off. i'd continue to backup like every couple of weeks or so.

simple enough and i think it's more than enough for home use. i am not serving 4TB of data so i dont require having a machine running raid, it doesnt have to be online 24/7, etc.

 

Yes, data access but not (secure) backup.

I've worked for the IT department of a medium-size university. I can say that file servers and tape backup were NOT in the same physical location.

Of course it beats a single HDD. But Redundancy =/= data security. It seems OP understands that. OP has backups on external HDDs (which aren't online I presume) which I consider to be a good practice.

 

^ you're right, they're not online. i connect my external drive(s), backup my data, disconnect my external drives and store those drives in a closet in another room. i know, i'm screwed in case of a catastrophy but I like my chances. lol

 

I doubt that more than a few households can afford the cost of tape backups. Just storing an extra $100 harddrive of your data at your parent's place is redundant enough for me.

Now we are entering the realm of enterprise level needs and not home servers. I say we stick to the original subject lest we want this thread to spiral into 100 different subject, making it literally pointless.

 

secured from hw failures, yes. that's one major feature of the file dublication, and the automatic backups of home server.

that's about backing up data for long time. here we talk about "system fails, need to restore" or "disk fails, need my data". in both cases, win home server delivers great experiences

you can schedule to an external disk on home server if you want, and send that weekly per mail or something to your parents home. what ever. you can do it.

 

You can also run iDrive, etc on WHS to backup on the net.

 

yes. or, what i like, copy your data over to another whs server over the internet. same as iDrive, but with actual knowledge where the data goes..

what i'd like would be some sort of mesh-based (p2p) home-server-backup on other home servers. one could participate, spend some storage to the network, and will then get storage on other home servers to back up the data.

that would be quite fun.. one could set up own such mesh-groups (with family and friends in) or just join globalmesh.homeserver.com.