Now I’m moving as much of my paperwork as possible to electronic format and given that we have lots of photos and video footage of the children in electronic form I decided it might well be sensible to have some sort of backup copy.
We don’t have sufficient bandwidth out here — it’s a long walk even to get as far as the middle of nowhere, so a local solution is necessary. To that ends I’ve just purchased an HP ProLiant micro server from Box Limited. It’s a 1.3GHz Athlon with space for four SATA disks, and a mere £235 with the offer of a further £99.99 cashback from HP. I’m going to put four or five 2TB+ disks in it in a RAID5 configuration (no spare, given that this is only for backups and I should therefore always be able to regenerate the data if I lose everything) giving a good chunk of disk space.
The server arrived today and appeared to accept a CentOS 5 installation happily so Linux is clearly going to play nicely. Now I just need to get the disks ordered and to decide what OS I’m actually going to install.