A Nifty Little Utility

First I need to explain that over the last year I have collected a lot of Digital Copies of Movies, Podcasts, TV Shows and Music. A lot as in around 1 Terabyte. Since ITunes will not let you down load the files more then once you have to have backups of your downloads.

So here is the problem. How do I backup a Terabyte of data and keep the backups in Sync. I was originally going to write some custom software to do this, but I just found this power toy from MS today. It is called SyncToy and you can use it to keep two directories in Sync on two different machines. This is exactly what I needed.

Now I have my 2 Terrabyte Raid 5 array backup to my two 1 Terabyte Mybooks. The MyBooks are two 500 GB disks stripped and can effectively backup half of my 2 Terabyte raid. In addition the My Books hang off the 1 Gigabit switch. This means I if I need to take down the Server where the RAID array is I can still write to the MyBoooks. SyncToy will keep the devices in sync no matter what. Pretty cool since it lets me treat the RAID array and the MyBooks both as Master copies and let SyncToy keep them in Sync.

I am also using Sync toy to back up my 4 Laptops to the Raid array. That way all my Laptops are in sync too. I definitely like having the 1 Gig switch for all this. Way to slow to move all this data through the wireless router. In addition with over six computers in the house keeping them all in sync was getting to be a pain.

Note: These two My Books are the World Editions that have Ethernet attachments so you can use them as SAN devices. I just noticed there is now a 2 Terabyte version of this.