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."

Comments

just buy more drives....

[swright]

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

raid != backup

[honold]

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.

Re:raid != backup

[jungd]

This is basically the solution I use. I have a cron job that unison/rsync's my files to the USB2 external drive every night. It also mirrors to my PC at work to provide location redundancy (it is 20miles away).

Re:raid != backup

[zulux]

Out of curiousity, have there been complaints from your ISP about the amount of bandwidth your backups are consuming?

Unison and RSymc only trasmit the things that have changed, down to the file level. They are quite efficent and I use both the backup up small offices over 56K without a problem.

Say you had a Quickbooks file that changed, instead of copying over all 28 megs of the file - Unison/RSync only copy the small bits that changed.

So if you only have a 56K connenction - you can seed the backup physically, but a 56K should be fine for 10 users with normal useage paterns.

BTW - Unison uses the RSync diference engine internally.

What do you want to accomplish?

[bluGill]

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.

Re:What do you want to accomplish?

[dpbsmith]

Indeed.

I don't know how effective it is, because I'm glad to say it hasn't been tested yet in practice, but for about five years I have been organizing the directory structure of my hard drive entirely by recovery strategy. That is, in simplified form... anything for which the recovery strategy is "reinstall from manufacturer's CD" goes in one top-level directory. Everything for which the strategy is "copy directory from backup CD" goes there... and so forth. Another category is "external documents," which are, in effect, hierarchical storage: the "real" documents life on the web, or on CD-ROM's, and are, in effect, being cached for quick reference on my hard drive.

The directory labelled "Created" contains every file that I have personally created as the result of performing keystrokes and mouse clicks. Believe it or not, after more than five years it all still fits easily on a single CD. DOing this sometimes requires fighting the applications and OS that sometimes have their own idea of where things should go, but I fight the fight.

One directory labelled "Keys" gathers together all of the various codes, CD labels, activation codes, registration codes, shareware-nag-disabling codes etc. that are needed when reinstalling software. To my surprise, I currently have well over fifty of them.

Backup is complicated, and the data on my hard drive falls into different categories for which different kinds of backup are needed. It's lovely when the technology stars happens to align for a while in such a way that there's a cheap, external, removable-media device that happens to be about the same capacity as your hard drive and supports fast reads and write, but that only happens for brief, shining moments.

Most difficult and annoying problem: there is NO POINT in doing a backup unless you have a way to verify that backup and unless you DO verify the backup. My biggest complaint against tape backup systems is that in my own limited personal experience, whenever I have run a verify on a tape backup I have gotten an error-free verify less than 50% of the time. (And, no, verifying by using the tape drive's "read-after-write" feature is NOT the same as verifying the tape in a separate run; not even close).

I'd add that if the backup software you're using has any kind of tricky system with wildcards and pattern-matching, for specifying what directories to include or exclude during the backup, you need to spend some serious time verifying THAT. Setting these things up is like doing a global search-and-replace with regular expressions. It seems simple but it is extremely easy to make a mistake resulting in the omission of things that you thought were being backed up.l

Tape.

[FreeLinux]

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.

Re:Raid stuff

[jshare]

If there is fire at my house, loosing home videos is not as bad as loosing business docs, source code, tax files, etc.

Good lord, man! Where are your priorities?!?

In 20 years, which one will you be more glad to have?