Don’t use Network Attached Storage for backups – save your $$$

September 14, 2007 in Tools by Mark Levison

Last year I decide to fix the backup problem in our house. They happened so rarely they were almost useless. After some research I bought a Buffalo Link Station to attach to the network. Think of it as a harddrive with a network card – you plug it into the network, turn it on, install from software on your computers. Now you have a network harddrive.

Mistake

What a mistake. Its slow, noisy and sucks back electricity like it’s going out of style. The original plan – leave it on all the time and just run scheduled backups from our machines. The problem: If left on 24/7 it consumes so (>$100/yr) worth of electricity. Result: We never turn it on. Even when it is on it runs so slowly as Networked storage that a full backup of 50+ gigabytes takes over a day. Nutsss. In end it gets used as an expensive USB drive. BTW the performance isn’t a network issue its the device itself.

My Solution?

Mozy. For $50/yr I get online backup. It uses Volume Shadow Copy so even files that are in use get backed up. It’s simple, it just installs and works. It took me less than 5 minutes to get started. The downsides:

We need one license for each computer in the family. (unless I back everything up to server – but then we’re using more electricity again).
Bandwidth limits kill – it took about 10 days to do our initial 45 gigabyte backup. I shudder to think how long a restoring the whole thing would take (perhaps 2-4 days). Sadly only a faster internet connection is ever going to solve this problem.

3 Comments

September 14, 2007 at 3:39 pm | Robert Wynkoop

I came up with about $17 per year to run the unit.

From Buffalo’s site: Average 17 W (with no USB devices connected)

I used formula from:

http://www.anapsid.org/electricitycost.html

17 x 24 hours/day = 408 watts
408 divided by 1000 = .408 Kwh
.408 x 0.12 = $0.04896/day
$0.04896/day x 365 = $17.8704/year
September 15, 2007 at 3:48 pm | Dwayne King

Hi Mark,

Not sure that it’ll make a difference given your experience, but I also struggled with the same thing (after getting tired of paying almost $200/yr for my online backups). I ended up with a Lacie 500Gb network drive, but the key determining factor here is that I got the Gigabit model. At around the same time I also switched my home network to gigabit and that made a huge difference. I can now move 5Gb video files fairly efficiently.

For me the biggest difference was when I got a gigabit switch for my internal network, which really sped things up.
September 19, 2007 at 4:09 pm | Mark Levison

Robert – thanks for the reply. I appear to have overestimated a bit. However using a borrowed Kill-a-Meter (http://the-gadgeteer.com/review/kill_a_watt_electric_usage_monitor_review) and measured the decives usage. Its using a bit more than suggested. In my short test it used > 30 watts (not including startup). So my original post inflated my costs – but not intentionally.

Thanks for pointing out my error.