Hello again, I need some advice on building a budget PC for data backups.
A bit of background, the lab I work at uses all custom built apparatuses running niche or custom written software. None of our computers are network connected and must stay that way to avoid the horrific HIPAA security. Recently one of our 20+ yr old Dells died and it’s thrown our lab into chaos as it was the only PC that was able to run our most heavily used piece of equipment.
What I want to do is to clone all of the hard drives of our important equipment running PCs and transfer them into an offline storage bank. I also want to transfer all of our old data so we don’t just have piles of HDDs in drawers and boxes.
What I don’t know is what I would need to do this, I figure we would want individual 2.5 SSDs cloning the equipment hard drives as they would have OS on them and then a few HDDs for data back ups.
Right now it looks like I have an HP Elitedesk 800 G4 SFF and an old Antec SX-1240 tower that looks like it has room for a bunch of drives. Everything else we have is DDR3 or older.
It’s bad but it’s what most research labs do. All of our stuff is built inhouse and then people leave. If we update to a newer PC and hit compatibility issues it could take weeks to months figure out the issue.
A Dell/Lenovo/HP is going to come with a steep markup and strings attached. I’m just trying to figure out what would be a decent budget solution. Fall back is to just clone everything and stick it in a box in my office, but I figure there has to be a better way.
Maybe one of the qnap / synology solutions depending on your budget.
From the software side, the backup can be acronis true image.
I don’t know exactly what amounts of money are we talking about. And I don’t know what level of protection and data availability for backups your lab requires.
Is it supposed to be a professional high-tech solution or a cheap amateur solution as long as it works.
Alternatively, you can use Odroid HC2 and large HDD.
It all depends on what you want to achieve. Do you want to replace the current damaged server with a new one? Are you just looking for a solution for additional backups and no need for additional functions and computing power?
If this machine is just a backup target, then I’d be looking at a Synology box. They get expensive compared to a self-build at the high end, but if you’d rather optimize for time and get something that “just works” they can be pretty nifty.
If this is a “do-everything” kind of machine that has specific requirements in terms of software, then maybe you’d be better off trying to virtualize whatever legacy OS you need for the lab gear.
Then buy the biggest qnap / synology / ixsystems you can afford.
If you want additional VM options then assemble a suitable PC server for as much as you can afford and truenas / unraid.
Or buy some Odroid HC2 and big HDDs and openmediavault.
You don’t want to give exact information about your circumstances and needs … all I can do is guess. So it makes no sense.
Answer yourself …
Determine how much $ you have.
How much space do you need to store data.
How much computing power do you need.
Decide whether it will virtualize operating systems.
Decide if you need dedicated software on the target machine.
OP might cobble together a system now, with parts he already has, which will work short term, but longer term is better.
Maybe add up storage needs at the moment, then think it might double in a year or two.
If one needs 8TB storage now, maybe get a 4- or 8-bay synology Nas, with two, 8TB drives, in a mirror/raid1. Then in a year, if needed, another pair of drives in an additional mirror in the same NAS.
If data not filling the first drives, there is space.
But small consummate Nas’s might struggle with more than 4-5 concurrent users.
And it might be easier to centralise the storage of a bunch of drives to just a couple.
It is October, so maybe Amazon will share some love with discounted parts; make a list this week of might work, and keep an eye out till January sales time in case discounts make a purchase look good to claim back on expenses/budget from the department?
Sorry, just to confirm: is there no difference in the text of HIPAA between “internet connected” and “locally networked”?
Because if there is a difference, that’s a solution right there: put up an inexpensive pre-built or SFF desktop and a decent 4+ bay NAS, network things to eachother, and automate backups, using the desktop as a management terminal.
If you can’t network the PCs, you really don’t need a computer for the backups at all (except briefly for copying data off those HDDs in boxes). Just Install Veeam on all those PCs, and configure it to automatically start a backup when a USB drive is connected. Then get yourself a few large capacity USB3 drives, and make it a procedure that every day/week somebody walks around plugging a different drive into each system, and properly labels them.
Although, if you could get away with a SAN without HIPPA issues, then maybe you could do something better.
I hate when people use hippa as an excuse for not doing reasonable things… in any case…
People who do photography, have this “ingest station” concept. It’s a computer with a bunch of adapters and some storage to which they copy the contents of CF or SD cards or whatever other media they might be recording to. Eventually that data ends up organized in various libraries - often times ends up on the network because that makes accessing it from multiple computers easier.
I’m thinking you could perhaps build a machine/computer that you could bring drives to, to “ingest” the drive contents into a backup.
Assuming the source are windows machines, have a look at this utility:
It’s just slightly more efficient dd, and you’d just need to move a drive to the backup station, run this once wait for it to go over the drive contents and you’re done.
As for drives / machines themselves, once you know you can restore from a backup… (please test this non-destructively), then upgrading/replacing these 20yo computers becomes easier. Also you might be able to swap HDDs in 20yo machines with nvme-sata adapters, or run old software in VMs, that’s kind of a lot of work.
