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Best Redundant Storage for Home Use?
Brad Mace asks: "Despite my hard drive's dedicated service, I'm aware that it will someday fail. I'm not really interested in burning 100 CD-Rs to backup my hard drive, so I've been looking at RAID solutions. Obviously I don't need the best or the fastest stuff out there. What would be a reasonable setup for personal use? Have people had better experiences with internal raid arrays, external raid towers, or networked storage such as Snap servers? I'm primarily interested in low price and ease of use."
And buy a raid card, and set it up and go. Many new motherboards support RAID of some sort onboard these days. Depending on the drive, it shouldn't cost you very much money at all. I'd store data on the RAID, and keep easily replaceable things (like applications) on another drive.
SCSI drives I used Linux software RAID. Worked well all the time until drives started dying.
I switched to Escalade 4way IDE card and could not be happier. I have about 800GB now on my home server.
I suggest polygamy.
Its not an ideal solution (what is?) but drives get bigger and cheaper all the time; just upgrade a bit more often than you would, keep a couple in the computer and rotate the others as offline backup... one or two may die, but they won't all die
If you buy a RAID card with on board cache make sure the cache is battery backed up otherwise a power cut may corrupt your array. Some of the cheaper cards don't have battery backup.
Despite my hard drive's dedicated service, I'm aware that it will someday fail.
In terms of storage efficiency, nothing beats the naggy girlfriend:
The downside, though, is the insanely high maintenance fee. Noisy too.
A large flabby lump of redundant storage.
raid only provides availability. if your fs gets hosed, you delete a file, or whatever you're unable to undo the damage. ditto if your pc gets burned or stolen.
if you want a real backup, make a real backup. if you want to do it cheaply, buy another drive, copy the contents of your data drive to it, and store it someplace safe. buying an external usb2/firewire enclosure will make this a lot easier.
I run a 6x120Gb software raid here. The redundency is nice but when you get that much storage in one place you start having other concerns.
Drive failures are scary. Note, if you're going with a hardware highpoint 1540 controller: forget raid 5. The array takes forever to rebuild (like 4 days) and sometimes fails midway though causing total data loss. (Other people may have different luck though, my friend is doing hardware on 4x160Gb and not enjoying it). I've had 2 drives fail on my software raid and the rebuild went well enough. I suspect the failures were due to inadequate power from the UPS causing a "brownout" condition when my power went off, since both failures happened after a power outage.
So other problems: thats 600Gb of disk space. Nobody in their right mind wants to sit through an fsck, so a journalling filesystem is needed.
but, all the journalling filesystems are new and untested. New your saying? They're a few years old.. and yes, thats true but they're new in comparision to all the other filesystems. And when you're talking about 600Mb of data on one filesystem it really starts to concern you.
(Even so, I've been running raid 5 with journalling on 4 to 6 drives for the last 1.5 years or so and haven't had filesystem corruption)
A friend of mine is running mixed drive sizes in his fileservr and doing no raid. He occasionally has failures and loses stuff, but at least he doesn't lose everything. Still, I'd be pissed if I lost an 80 gig chunk at a time.
The problem with raid is, you gain some redundency but you completely lose the ability to make sensable backups. Unless you're a corporation and can afford $3k for a tape drive (and an additional $500 for tapes) you're faced with the idea of mostly redundent, but no backups. Offsite backups become really appealing, but then you need to shell out the same money for drives that won't be put to use (until something happens)
I still don't have a solution for offsite backups.
As an aside, I started playing with encrypted partitions (not raided). That has the same sort of scaryness. One filesystem screwup and you lose everything. No backups unless you have a second hard drive. Then you're faced with raid 1 which would corrupt both drives, or copying the encrypted volume from drive to drive each night.
I've got no answer for that one ethier, except that encrypting a tape backup would probably be good in a corporate situation.
OK, my own experiences in this area:
I was looking for a basic, cheap RAID system to give me some redundancy.
I got an Adaptec 1200A RAID Controller card, and used two drives in RAID1 mode. This served me well, until I needed more capacity - RAID1 has 100% wasted space.
So I looked at RAID5. I got a Highpoint RocketRAID 454, because it was cheap. BIG mistake. The write performance, on my P4 2.8 Ghz, with three WD1200JB drives, was a terrible 9 Mb/sec, with 80-100% CPU usage. AVOID. I returned it then next day.
Now I have a Promise SuperTRAK SX6000. It's very nice, 25 Mb/s write with only 20% CPU thanks to RISC processor, but expensive.
In summary:
If you want RAID1 only, a nice cheap Adaptec will do fine. If you want RAID5, you will need a reasonable card. Promise do some cheaper ones than the SX6000, with less channels, you could look at those.
Hope this helps!
You need to determin what you want to accomplish first. I've taken the stance of creating paper copies of everything on my computer that I care about (until my printer broke...), which works because it is only a small amount of financial information. Everything else can be re-constructed, or just forgotten about. OTOH, I want my grandpa to have a better backup system because his computer holds family tree information. (He also has a lot of historical information that isn't in the county archives but should be)
So first you need to take inventory of what you have. All those illegal mp3s can be downloaded from the net again. Your OS can be re-installed from CDs or the net, as can all your applications. All those jokes that you are saving can be found on the net. All those short stories that you have created can be published on your website at your ISP, and re-downloaded from there. (Make sure you keep this up to date two way, ISPs don't always backup websites) Usenet is a good palce to publish that, and google will archive. Family pictures belong on your website for the family to see.
That leaves a small amount of private data. Is it still an unreasonable amount to burn this to a CD/DVD? If so invest in tape backup (which is expensive, but holds more data).
Do not forget off-site storage for all this, a fire will destroy your home including the computer and backup. This is the biggest problem I have with RAID.
Seriously... I got on eBay and bought an older server (dual PII), with RAID and 5 hot-swap SCSI bays and a tape drive. I bought 6 SCSI drives the same way. Got it all for less than the cost of a new desktop.
I keep all my data on the server, and do backups. Anything short of a house fire or a stupid robber willing to lug a heavy old server and I'm good...
I'm sure that the flames will now commence as many Slashdotters seem religiously opposed to tape. In fact a recent Slashdot artice cited some tech magazines prediction that tape was obsolete. But, tape is still an excellent storage medium.
The fact is that tapes last for a very long time with a shelf life of at least decades. Most especially when they are not used much, as is the case when tape is used to backup a hard drive and is only accessed again if the hard drive fails and a restore is required.
Tapes store much more than any other removable storage medium. CD-ROM and DVD can't hold anywhere near as much as most tapes can.
Tapes do not cost too much, contrary to what many people say. Right now, on eBay, Travan 8GB drives start at US$5.00 and DLT 30/70 GB drives start at US$50.00 and go on up to >US$300.00. The tapes themselves can be more expensive especially when one chooses the preferred new tapes but, again eBay has DLT tapes available for anywhere form US$2.00 to US$100.00 per tape.
You suggest that you may choose to use RAID. But, tape is still a better alternative. RAID is effective in protecting you from a single drive failure but, it does not protect you against accidental deletion, rogue applications, viruses, versioning or controller failure. On the other hand, tape and the right backup strategy can protect you from all these issues.
Almost always tape backups are the best alternative.
I've considered going dumpster diving for old 40GB hds, which I know will be outside of many near by technology companies. No, it's not that I'm that poor. It's more that it's a shame to see it all go to waste, and it's not really worth it to buy those drive for what they're typically sold for. In my own convoluted, almost female, logic, the saved money would give me permission to splurge on a better than the average picknic basket raid solution.
This is of course predicated on my belief that, from recent police stories, crap tossed out is more or less there for the taking. Assuming the property isn't gated or in some other way "off limits."
I figure for around $500 I could throw together a very nice network storage device with around 240 GB and some decent fault tolerance.
A RAID array is a good backup for hardware failure in an environment where 99.99999% uptime is the goal. However, many failures that would blow your drive are software based... For example, if you are running under Windows XP, one of MS's specially formatted "updates" could wipe out your system. And with no widely available NTFS repair solutions such recovery can become very expensive very quickly. While this may not be as much of an issue on a non-proprietary file system, even Linux sometimes requires a full system re-install. Having that 2nd drive on an ATA chain will save you the few hundred for a good raid card, and will save your data in the event of, for example, a virus that deletes all local data... or accidently typing "apt-get upgrade" twice in a row.
Just set a cron job to mount, copy all, and unmount every week. Short of a rapidly moving brushfire, you should be all set. All this for less than $150 dollars.
The ______ Agenda
Get two external, USB2.0 hard drive enclosures. Get two hard drives equal in capacity to your old one, and put them in the enclosures (actually, you can use just one enclosure and store the hard drives in padded plastic shipping bags when you're not using them). Periodically clone your hard drive to both of the external drives, and set the external drives in a safe place. I think it would be extremely surprising if all three drives were to fail at once. In fact, it would be shocking.
Anyway, this is pretty cheap. Check out tigerdirect.com for some prices, they sell all this kinda stuff. I think the whole thing would only run a few hundred bucks at most.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I've been dealing with mirrored RAID cheap harddrives for a couple of years now on medium duty systems (in harsh environments), and I can tell you two things:
1) I haven't yet seen a situation where both hard drives failed simultaneously so badly that I couldn't recover most* of the data.
2) RAID is not a replacement for a good backup.
No matter what, you should keep a seperate copy of the data at minimum separate from the computer itself, ideally offsite. You should also have a mirrored setup so a small failure (one drive, or fried computer with still working drive) won't set you back to your previous backup data.
What I've done temporarily is use a HD caddy (but now I'd go with a USB 2.0 or Firewire drive) to take an occasional snapshot which I can take offsite, storing it in a different place.
You should plan on expending at least $200 for a decent backup solution.
Further, I suspect you overestimate your backup needs. Compression helps with most everything. If you are backing up movies, burn them to DVD and keep them offsite. If you are backing up programs, burn those to disc and keep them offsite. If you are backing up pictures, burn them the DVD and keep them off site. You only need to continually re-backup items that change over time, and that data is vastly smaller than what you think you need to back up right now, and generally can be compressed up the wazzoo.
But you're looking for the easy way out. So, do mirrored drives, and try to get an external drive at some point later in time.
-Adam
*I did have lightening take out a server, which fried everything in that computer. I'm glad I had a regular backup. For kicks, I tried anyway, and one hard drives still worked, but a small portion of the data was corrupt, and it wasn't worth fixing since I had a known good backup from the night before.
Right now, hard drives are the cheapest data storage medium bar none. Even an external USB or Firewire drive is cheaper per gig than tape/DVD/whatever for mortals once you factor in the cost of the drive (datacenters with terabytes of data are a different story).
For most of us, we have a lot of data that we keep "just in case", and that collection grows pretty slowly. So, once you've made the initial backup, the incrementals are pretty small.
There are three types of failure to worry about: drive failure, stupidity ("oops. I just deleted everything."), and major physical loss (theft, fire, etc.). Any second set of data on different media handles the first problem. An asynchronous second set of data (i.e. not RAID) handles the second problem. Off-site backups handle the third.
So, for off-site backups, I made an initial backup locally with a Firewire drive, then I shipped it to a friend's house. He leaves it plugged in to his machine, mounted off of my home directory on his machine. I make nightly incrementals and send them off to his place. Every few weeks, I grab the drive, take it back to my place, and do a fresh full backup.
If you have no friends (this is slashdot, after all), you could probably take the drive to work, so long as your boss doesn't object.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
My main machine is connected to a redundant server several miles away via ~600Mbps ATM running across a free space optical network. I use cron and an Rsync based backup script to backup everything to the offsite location twice a day. It hasn't let me down yet.
A brand new USB2 Travan 20/40GB external drive will run you $450. 20/40 tapes are $45.
They're pretty fast (20MB/s), work with all modern OS, and can backup over a local network.
If you have more than around 30GB of data that you need to back up regularly (aside from one-time dumps of your MP3 collection) then you have Enterprise-class problems, and shouldn't try to do things on the cheap.
What exactly is that? It seems to me that you are implying that women have some kind of inferior logical thought process (which you are "loath to admit" to following), and that it is "female" to think about spending money you have saved.
This appears rather sexist to me.
But if the original poster loses his data because (as he seems to imply) he is too lazy to do a proper backup, then he deserves everything he'll get.
These days, for cheap, hotswapable raid solutions you have:
1. External USB2 or Firewire enclosures with cheap IDE disks
2. SATA drives with SATA drive caddies
Combine the above with software raid.
When it comes to RAIDing, I prefer to raid the kitchen.
When it comes to backing up, paper + a good safe works well and has a longer shelf life than most computer media.
Software RAID
You are just looking to ensure that if one HDD goes down, you still have most of your data. Software RAID mirroring incurs large performance penalties. Oh, and do note that many companies produce "Hardware RAID" cards that aren't hardware raid. Its hardware ASSISTED raid. These systems can't, or have great dificulty booting root of a raid system.
Hardware RAID
Either SCSI or IDE. I've changed my tune about IDE RAID. If you do it in hardware, it is a pretty good and valid option. It provides increase in speed and ease of setup (in most cases, litteraly plug and play). 3ware are a good company for hardware IDE raid controllers. Also they are very well priced.
Big hunking hotswappable SCSI RAID
If you have money to blow, here's the best place to blow it. Here the RAID system (whatever level) is done with hotswapping drives. 99.99% of the time, THIS IS A WASTE OF MONEY. For most small companies, and a lot of midrange companies, hotswap is throwing money away. Unless your server NEEDS to run 24/7 with 5 nines reliablity, hotswap is a waste. Hotswap only offers the ability to replace a bad drive without downing the system. But if you want to spend the money, or like the look of the flashing lights on the cases, go for it.
Ok, next, is RAID the answer?
Yes and no. RAID (mirroring) protects against hardware failure. It doesn't stop anyone from typing `rm -rf /` or anything similar. So if you want backups against mistake, RAID doesn't offer this.
Backups
Unless you have money to burn, tape backups are expensive. Most of us have 20 or 40 gig HDD drives. If you try and buy a tape backup at this level, you are talking a significant ammount of money (eg possibily the same as the cost of your system in the first place).
It is possible to do tape on the cheap, but not recommended.
CD/DVD burners
CDs hold 700MB of data (maximum), so doing a 20gb backup would require 29 CDs in total. This is probably not viable. So lets put that asside for now.
DVDs hold between 2 and 4GB (depending on various hardware, etc). That becomes more viable. You wouldn't do a full backup each day with this mehtod (still requiring 6 dvds to do 1 full backup), but you can do it using a base + data method.
By backing up the entire system on 6-7 dvds say once a month, you can then procede to do incremental backups over the month on 1 or 2 dvds (depending on how much you change). If you also are careful how you store your data, things that you want, but aren't likely to change. Eg your mp3 collection, you can backup to a seperate dvd, saving space on your incremental and full system backup.
Removable HDDs
The final option is, imho, the best. By having, preferably, 2 external HDDs (either using USB drive holders or the old caddy system), you can backup most, if not all of your system onto the removable drive. If you get removable disks that are the same size as your internal HDD, you can backup the entire system.
The pros are obvious. The cons however may bite you. First, in theory, you can drop a tape on the ground and have no problems. Do NOT drop your remoable HDD. So you'll need to be careful. HDDs are also rather more volatile than tapes or CDs when it comes to keeping its data. You'll need to ensure that you store the HDDs in a good location.
If one HDD fails (either a removable, or your internal) you'll be able to restore from one of the working ones. I said you should have atleast 2 removable HDDs because when you do a backup, the first thing you do is delete the old data from the removable. if the system failed then, you are screwed.
I prefer this system, and for some SOHOs I offer it as a viable option if they need data backups.
Summary
Either way, in the end, it comes down to how much you are willing to pay. Backups are still NOT cheap. Its something that should change, but in the short/medium term, it won't.
I use to have a funny sig, but slash cut it off, and I forgot what the punchline was.
We use the 1200A for our clients who are to cheap to go SCSI (or for home system). The 1200A from Adaptec works perfectly for us with Seagate/IBM drives, we have about 5 deployed with no problems. The interface is easy to use and setup is a breaze, I highly recommend it.
Alternativly if you want to go a bit more high end the 1210SA (I think) is a Serial ATA RAID card. Hook that up to two Western Digital 10k RPM Raptors and you got some nice fast RAID, but not much space.
Two things to note:
1) As others have said this will only protect against HDD failures, not File System corruption, viruses and user stupidity (admit it we've all done it). Get some backup.
2) Western Digital Parralel ATA drives 40GB-120GB have a problem with RAID so avaid them like the plague.
This isn't ideal, but it meets my needs.
/mnt. My home is relatively small and they contain files that I have manually created. On Windows, I also have a directory of applications. All of them run as-is without the need of an installer or I have a registry file of its entries on an installation. Other applications that require an installer do not get backed up. Finally, I have some system-level files like in /etc, and under Windows, my hosts file and minor things like that. These types of files are taken care of by DAT tape. Larger stuff in /mnt include GB upon GB of files I have scoured from the net. They are mainly anime, but as I accumulate enough GBs, I write these to DVD-R or CD-R and remove them from online storage.
I don't worry about backing up the OS at all since if I have some sort of crash, I will do a reinstall. It is more of a hassle, but when I do have a crash, it will be (hopefully) several years after my last install and I can clean house and start afresh. So the files that I am interested are personal files.
My files are organized by those in my home directory (Documents and Settings/login on Windows) and others in
It's a haphazard way of backing up, but I find that when I have a crash (occurred once), I ended up not really caring about the files I've lost/backed up since I can Google for a newer version online faster than looking for the right tape/CD/DVD and restoring.
For my personal systems, I don't think I'll ever do RAID.
I've got a couple of StorageTek 9393-600 DASD devices that are 630GB of storage in RAID 6 for sale...
admin@jkoebel.net if you are interested or want more information. They're pulls from the local school district datacenter, they weren't big enough.
This system only really works with small files (ie. text documents, small images, config files.. not really recommended for MP3s and divxs, or your 1gig outlook.pst file)
Have a script that runs overnight, that zips/tars up all the relevant files with as much encryption/password as required.
At work, have a script on your machine that ftp's in to your home ftp server and downloads the zip file.
Rename it to something un-obvious (ie. sysconfig.dat) and puts it on your personal file share on the server.
Work takes care of everything from then onwards! No need to hassle yourself with tape rotation, off-site backups (although you technically already have at least one off-site backup, you get more thrown in for free by your employer!)
- Chuq
This is a very broad topic, and I am going to assume that you use Windows. Maybe someone else has posted something useful if you use another OS. I personally use an old prosigina pII with piggy back 7 drive 9.1 GB SCSI RAID 5. This cost me about $200, as they thought the system was dead. It wouldn't boot (black screen with a single beep), I looked up the error codes and all it needed was a new CPU ;). I also use the Windows back up utility on a scheduled job to back up a folder that is the root for everything that changes on a regular basis, and that I'd commit suicide if I'd lost. I also burn the same folder once a month to make sure. I do development works at home so I have multiple reasons to have this kind of setup. My SQL server runs on it too.
e m=3055247111&category=51218), or local newsgroups, and see what is for sale. You'd be surprised at what is for sale that still has a lot of lovin' left for a home. These systems may be crap for an Enterprise environment, but are great for the home.
If you are just concerned about losing your documents, the cheapest way to go is to just use the Windows back up, with mirroring RAID if you have a MOBO that supports it. All you'll need is a new HDD to match the existing one, as well as a cheap burner for offline back ups. If you don't have RAID capabilites still use Windows Back Up, still get a cheap burner and discipline yourself to do back ups of the 'back up' once a week.
Hope this helps!
I'd follow these guidelines:
1) What do you want to back up?
2) How much do you want to back up?
3) How much do you want to spend?
4) Can you leverage what you have now?
In a lot of cases it is just a matter of altering 'how' you do things. To answer all of the above, especially if money is an issue is too check out Ebay (http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&it
Having said that, I suspect RAID is what you're really interested in, because you're trying to protect more against unexpected drive failure than accidental file deletion or natural disaster, both from a practical and affordability perspective. If you're anything like me, you've got hundreds of gigs of data, but maybe only a few gigs that are *really* important and irreplaceable.
I "only" have about a half-terabyte of space and it's about 80% full. The main reasons I've not upgraded to more is a) affordability (I'm broke and unemployed at the moment) and b) the case is physically full. However, in the last few years of building and maintaing my setup which is solely for my own personal use at home, I'll pass on the things I've learnt.
Performance is not really important. Most likely, you're going to be accessing the data over a 100 megabit network and at the end of the day, 10 megabytes/second isn't going to be a struggle for any RAID setup you build out of modern disks, no matter how poorly optimised.
Following on from that, don't get to focussed on things like making sure each IDE drive is on its own channel. I've got eight drives hanging off four IDE channels and it's still more than capable of flooding my network. The raw speed is upwards of 30 megs/sec. For a "single user" type setup it's quite fast enough - particularly since most of the time you probably won't be doing much that requires high performance.
Avoid hardware RAID controllers, the advantages they offer really aren't pertinent to a "home" environment. It reduces you to a single point of complete and utter failure and, more importantly, if a few years down the track the card dies, you might not be able to access any of your data _at all_ if you can't find an identical replacement card somewhere. Even if the entire machine dies, with software RAID you can pull the drives and put them into another machine if you *really* need data off them. With a hardware RAID card you'd have to either buy another one or wait for the original to be RMA'd (assuming it was even still under warranty). This might not be such a problem in the US where hardware is cheap and plentiful and support easy to get, but here in Australia it's a major concern to me. Hardware RAID is only good if your OS doesn't have good software RAID (and Linux, FreeBSD and Windows NT/2k/XP all have quite adequate support) and/or you want to be able to boot off your RAID array (I use a separate disk for the system, because it's trivial to reinstall and I don't really care about losing it) and/or you have much $$$ to spend on a high quality RAID controller with battery backed cache and a guaranteed support timeline.
Consider future expansion. I use four RAID 1 arrays tied together under LVM because my previous experience with a single RAID5 and trying to add space after the initial setup taught me that RAID5 is nice for maximising space, but it's a nightmare to expand afterwards. Now when I want to add more space, I just setup another RAID1 with two drives and add the redundant space via LVM. RAID1s are a *lot* easier to deal with than RAID5s, plus my overall setup is now more reliable.
Now, this is far from an ideal setup for a "real" server, but IME the most important aspect of any single-user home setup is cost, with reliability, speed and simplicity following behind in the distance.
> Anything short of a house fire
You say this mostly in jest, perhaps, but a house fire is the thing that most
frightens me in terms of data loss. Hard drive failure would be bad, but a
fair amount of my *most* important data is on more than one physical drive.
Still, a house fire would take it all. The prospect scares me. I've got a
few CD-Rs offsite, but it's nowhere near enough.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I did this recently too (it's not quite up and running yet, but getting there).
I was able to get a PIII Compaq server with 6-bay drive cage and a RAID card for ~$US500. The drives were pulled from another machine I bought that had 18 36GB U160 SCSI drives in it, so I've got plenty of replacement drives as well...
I have a software RAID5 setup under RedHat, for a small network (5 boxes) performance hit is non existent due to each drive having it's own channel.
the setup:
member partition size: 73.5GB (formatted size of 80GB HD:
2x 80GB WD800BB drives
1x 120GB WD1200JB drive (partition = size of other 2)
1x 200GB WD200JB drive, ditto
the whole thing forms a 220GB RAID5 array with about 120GB left over. the majority of the data is divx/xvid movies and such, mp3's programs, ISO's etc. The movies are backed up to CD (also makes convenient loanable copy for my friends who are hard drive/bandwidth challenged), i'm not too worried about totally losing that stuff, with the CD backup set and a friend having the same files on his HD's)
the rest of it that matters (personal data, photos, savegames, etc) can fit on a handful of CD's and is also backed up on a portion of the 111GB on the 200giger (said data is chmodded 700 and far away from any samba shares).
If i had a DVD burner, i'd use it, but CDR's are $.25 a piece for backups and work well for now.
for home use, software raid5 is inexpensive, and easy to backup (external HD, DVD, CDR, network drive, etc), if it runs linux, the weak link is your windows boxes, just keep them secure (i.e. lock workstation and/or keep yourself logged out with 2 separate passwords for the workstation and file server), just remember if you do ANY system maintenence on your file server, to UNMOUNT the data storage partition(s) to prevent say a rm -rf / from hosing everything.
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA
Hello ALL, currently the IDEAL way to store data would be a DVD-RAM Carousel with say 100-500 discs. At 9.7 GB a disk, that's roughly 10 - 50 terabytes. Currently though, the only EBAYed DVD carousel I can find is the PowerFile c200. It's a DVD-R only carousel so it's of limited use (though it holds 100 discs.) I have been thinking, because that PowerFile uses 2 DVD-R drives, would it work if you remove the Dvd-r drives and swap them with DVD+RW and or DVD-RAM? DVD-RAM discs are ideal though because they can be writen to up to about 100,000 times (hundred thousand for European readers.) i will never use a harddrive backup system simply because harddrives are mechanical and have a limited life (if it's got a 1year warranty, probably a VERY limited life.) The only other plausable permanent storage media is solid state disks, which cost SOOO MUCH, we'll probably never see them large enough for general use in our lifetimes.
Actually, I didn't say it in jest. I just figure I've got bigger issues than data loss if my residence goes up in flames.
Under those circumstances, I'd only want to see myself and my wife get out alive, and I'd be very happy if I managed to save my cats as well. Anything over that is just a bonus - and I have relatives who will attest to that based on personal experience.
However, you can always invest in a safety deposit box at your local bank, and put a tape in it once a week... or possibly set up a wireless link to a dedicated box running in a neighbour's house to which you can send your data in real time.
If at least one machine on your LAN is Mac or PC, you might want to pick up something like the Maxtor OneTouch. The 120GB version is only about $180 these days. This thing has USB2 and firewire, and a single button on the front that you push to fire up Retrospect software to back up a mac/pc.
The nice thing is this button is programmable, so you can just fire off your rsync script to backup your other samba shares or whatever.
Do a weekly backup with a single push of a button, throw the thing in your backpack, and take it to work and leave it there. Bingo. Off-site storage.
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I suspect that figure includes a bunch of stuff you might not need to backup. Myself, other than some files under /etc, and a couple under /boot I don't bother with OS files. Waste of time, I've established that I can flatline my Debian box at home and have it rebuilt to a virtual clone in reasonable time. Ditto application files, other than a couple rare exceptions.
That's goning to be the most effective way to trim the bottom line, be selective in what you backup.
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
http://www.abit-usa.com/products/mb/products.php?c ategories=1&model=89
is a fine Motherboard with built-in RAID 0/1. Used these days for about $50
Have you been DaMa9eD today?
Yeah, that's pretty rare, and preventable if I'd taken more precautions, but if your data is really that valuable, it needs to be backed up somewhere outside the same computer case--maybe outside the home, depending on your needs.
A reasonable person would probably just throw out old stuff, and stuff that will never be used. But I'm unreasonable
So what I'm looking for is an extendable, cheap way to store lots of CDs. I want something a little more flexible than a spindle. I'm currently thinking about getting one of those CD "bins" reminiscant of the old 3.5 in floppy drive bins (they are plastic containers that hold the disks upright, so you can flip through them like files; they usually have a hinged top). I plan to put all my CDs in those individual tyvek sleeves, and put them in a CD bin. This might require me to buy a lot of those sleeves, but it seems like a decent solution.
Anyone else have any other ideas, thoughts, comments, suggestions, etc?
I'm surprised that no one has recommended the Linux md driver. It performs extremely well even with IDE disks. You don't get hot-swap without special hardware, but you probably don't need that for a home machine
They're firewire drives right? Nice and portable. Just load it up with your backup and leave it at the office.
No, I've never done it... wish I had the iPod to try it with though. =) Does regular drive access work with non-Macs?
If you are interested in a remote backup solution, and/or keeping multiple snapshots of the filesystem at different times, you could use rsnapshot. It makes filesystem snapshots with rsync, and also allows remote snapshots to be taken over ssh, so you can back up multiple machines.
Full disclosure: I am the author of this program.
http://rsnapshot.scubaninja.com/
Why are you wasting that 120 and 200 GB drive in a RAID5 array with 2 80s? Replace those big drives with 80s and use the other two for something else.
Yes there are some significant issues with such a set-up but I don't know if the set-up merits a "retarded" label if it's what he had to work with. I guess that's why you posted AC?
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
That reminds me of, a while back, a company selling high quality Sony betamaxes for storage. Seemed like a nifty idea.
I'm seeing a lot of answers about having a RAID filesystem, and then backup that. But what about the opposite?
I mean, have a backup and then RAID it. How, you ask? Well, just make a disk image on a file, or whatever you call it on your OS, and then upload it to a safe computer which has RAID (1 or 5, not just 0) with enough space to backup all of the other computers (or the files on a special directory of each that keeps the important files), and have it all stored there. Then, at regular intervals you rsync and only the changes are transmitted. That way, you get protection over hardware failures (not disasters or other stuff), and the big advantage of having a disk image, which you dump as-is in a drive and have all your data as it was. Pretty cool.
To get protection against disasters, you can share this drive with a neighbor, or other remote system, and, as usual, just rsync the data. This may sound stupid, because you can just mount a directory over the network and work there, but, as I pointed out previously, with this method you have a snapshot of your filesystems, and works almost OS-independently. And you get hard-drive speed and not network speed while you work on your files, which tends to suck on a busy network (see note at the end).
The downside of this is, that every computer has a lot of gigabytes that are repeated (OS files, programs), and these are the troublemakers, because every computer needs them. Audio files are another problem because they are big (compared to user documents and stuff), so you can work with these remotely, straight off the server (these get backed up because the server has RAID-1, remember?)
Note: This set up may work for a small home network, but of course it's no good for a 100-computer site. The idea of HD backup is that nowadays HD is the cheapest media.
I'd go with something like that if I had a dedicate machine with about 160Gb of disk space, and it doesnt sound that expensive. At least not as tape backup.
Oh, and of course, because the data isn't instantly reflected, you WILL lose data when you are finishing a long document or something. Murphy's law!.