Splitting sage from WHS, best place to store photos/music??

[btrcp2000]

This weekend begins the umpteenth rebuild of my sage server, which I have separated from WHS to its own win7 machine. It will be backed up however by an off-the-shelf Acer h340 WHS box. For stuff that is permanent (baby pics, music,ripped dvds), is it best to store on whs and have sage pull from there, or to store on the sage machine and have whs back up along with everything else? Are there speed issues if sage is always pulling from somewhere else on the network? What if the WHS box is asleep?

[ohpleaseno]

Put everything on the WHS with folder duplication turned on. I strongly recommend (especially for the pictures) that you use some sort of online storage for them (picasa is super cheap).

I have the same setup as you (went from a WHS install of sage to a Win7). If your sage box get borked, instead of having to restore a ton of media, you're only doing the system and recordings.

I have SJQ set up to transcode recordings older than three weeks and automatically move them to the WHS. The less you have in the backup, the faster and easier it is to restore a broken machine.

[btrcp2000]

Hmm, hadn't thought about the recordings. I don't really care about them in terms of backup. I have not had a functional whs box in several weeks, and I forget can I tell the WHS nightly backup process to ignore the separate physical drive that contains the recordings, and only focus on the OS drive?

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

Hmm, hadn't thought about the recordings. I don't really care about them in terms of backup. I have not had a functional whs box in several weeks, and I forget can I tell the WHS nightly backup process to ignore the separate physical drive that contains the recordings, and only focus on the OS drive?

Yes. You can go back into the PC you have configured for backup and uncheck the physical drives and/or have it exclude folders in the WHS console.

As to your original questions I have and/or work with my photos/music files on another PC and have WHS back up that PC and those files. (So I copy/sync those files out to WHS which is my Sage server) I think it is 6 of one, half of dozen of the other as to how you want to do it. I'm not sure there are any real disadvantages in either.

Gerry

[tchapin]

If you're keeping the WHS box, I would use that to store your "static" content. However, if the WHS server goes to sleep and does not support "wake on lan", that content will be unavailable.

You should have no network speed issues with having the static content on a separate box from the physical sage machine. Tons of people do that.

[sic0048]

For sake of ease, keeping pictures and documents on the WHS is better. For best protection against loss, keeping the files on another networked computer is probably better. You can set WHS not only to backup each computer, but it can duplicate the backups across several drives too. So you are basically getting the same duplication feature you would have if you kept the files on the WHS machine, but they are also located on the local computer. Therefore there is an additional layer of protection IMHO doing it that way.

That being said, it is much easier keeping all those files on the WHS machine and that is how my household does it.

[btrcp2000]

Getting such good answers here, I'll throw out another question:

My h340 came with one 2tb drive, and has not even been plugged in yet. Given my awful experience with whs sys drives (lost three os drives in the past 10 months, 2 simultaneously in a raid1 config), I am considering putting in a smaller os drive and fresh reinstalling the h340 whs disc, and using the 2tb for storage, while adding another 2tb for duplication, for a total of three drives. I learned long ago that I prefer to have files on a separate physical disc from the os, as it is always the os drive that goes, it seems.

Would anyone bother with this, or is it overkill/paranoia?

[RocKKer]

Alot of enterprise servers use a local/internal drive for the OS and separate/external (SAN or NAS usually) storage for data, so your not paranoid and it is not overkill. It's practical if you can afford the additional drive and makes darn good sense for just the experience you have had.

I keep my OS drive separate from my storage array.

It's not "if" you will lose a HDD it's "when".