Mirra, has finally nailed a nationwide deal with Best Buy, and has also announced two new drives and some price cuts on its lower end models. First the company churned out two new models – 160GB and 400GB drives and at the same time dropped the price by $250 on the 250GB model to $500. The 160 GB drive is going to cost $400, while the 400 GB monster is going to set you back a cool $800. (A cheap PC with extra storage could cost about that much… I bet!) I might be forced to use a PC, (Mac version is coming… when only god knows!) but I still love the device. Just all the digital clutter in one place!
One thing that comes to mind when I read, ” all the digital clutter in one place!” is Single Point of Failure. What you need are two of these beasts (one as a mirror — in other words, basic RAID).
i have nearly a terrabyte of data – so i know how that feels. anyway two of these are a better idea. i do now back-up stuff on DVDs.
I’d love to see this finally support Mac though at 800 bucks for 400GB, I’d almost rather have a mac mini with some external drives do my backups.
i agree with you totally. no mac support is pretty lame and am fairly disappointed that despite promising for a mac support, the company has failed to follow through
A solution to this data back problem would be to create a service that can take incremental snapshots of your data and store it remote. Ofcourse the service would have RAID, USP, security and what not. The client should somehow tightly integrate with the OS. As soon as you write something to the filesystem, it sends a copy across to the server out there. The user doesnt need to know (or remember) about taking backups anymore.
Not only it gives you protection against data loss, it also gives out geographic diversity incase all hell breaks loose (ala 9/11).
Anyone ready to take and run with this idea?
You don’t need to have a RAID for a Mirra. It’s a special purpose backup device, not a NAS. The only thing it can do is backup files. Thus, by definition, it’s files are already backed up: on the client PCs.
Think of it this way: do you backup the tapes that your backup your data on? No, because it’s a backup.
When the Mirra drive fails, you go down to best buy and buy a new drive for it. As long as you don’t suffer a simulaneous drive failure on any of your clients, you should be fine.
If you’re looking to have files “live” on the network, you want a cheap NAS with RAID: something like the buffalo terastation would do the trick.
I’m considering the Mirra 400 for a lab of about 10 computers. I like the idea that it’s so simple to use because getting anyone in our lab to back themselves up is impossible. I would like to hear any other good suggestions. I’ve looked at NAS devices but to get 400 GB would be too expensive that way.