Freebsd – Distributed mirrored filesystem under FreeBSD

If you're open for a Microsoft/IIS 7 solution, one option is to use IIS7's Application Request Routing (ARR).

There is an introduction/tutorial here in this article on learn.iis.net: HTTP Load Balancing using Application Request Routing. There is a feature called "SSL Offloading":

When this feature is enabled, all communication between the ARR server and the application servers are done in clear text, even for HTTPS requests from clients to the ARR server. When both the ARR server and the application servers are deployed within a trusted network, such as within the same datacenter, enabling SSL offloading does not sacrifice security.

Also, enabling this feature can further help to maximize the server resources on the application servers, since they do not have to spend cycles in encrypting and decrypting requests and responses.

If you want to delve into the subject, here is another article about ARR, which explains how to use the mechanism in combination with hardware load balancers.

As Nic said, how much data do you need?

For myself, every file I've ever created (going back 20 years, although the old old ones are really small), most of my wife's files (most because she's switched PCs a few times and there are a few odds and ends on older hard drives), every picture we've taken or scanned, and most of our family videos (not the raw files straight from the camera, but lots of "the best" clips) all fit on a 320GB hard disk. It'll take at least 3 years before I get to 500GB.

So I just have 4 copies of everything on external hard drives. One drive stays at home, one small one goes with me, one stays at an office, the last one moves around. I use SecondCopy to back up the files from my laptop to the external drives and I do a backup to at least one of the external drives any time I change more than a couple files. Hard drives are cheap enough that when I need bigger ones, it won't cost much, and I'll put aside at least a couple of the 320s to keep forever.

I'm seriously considering (since my laptop hard drive is almost full) getting rid of the "master" copy of all my stuff that's on my laptop and just treating two of the hard drives as my carry-around storage, and the other two as stationary backups.