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

Re:just buy more drives....

[swright]

ok I didn't explain myself all that well...

You most likely don't need RAID, you say yourself you don't need the performance and you probably dont mind being offline for a couple of hours swapping out hardware if the worst happens.

All you need is a few extra hard drives lying around that you back up to; perhaps two in the machine; manually copy from one to the other (or use rsync), and one offline for a weekly/fortnightly backup

Buy old equipment

[Baron_Yam]

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...

2nd Drive

[cgenman]

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.

external drive at a friend's house

[PapaZit]

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.

Re:Tape.

[pfl]

It was not mentioned how much would need to be backed up, but I've used my Digital Video camera as a backup tape device for my important data. For me it's a very nice solution since now I use the same equipment for home videos and Gnomemeeting as well. Talk about a starving hacker/wife approved budget... :-)

Good things with DV tapes are that they come with ~10GB of storage space and 3.5MB/s speed. Works very nicely with dvbackup

Of course DV tapes are a non-standard solution, longer tapes do not exist yet and the solution does not scale - but hey, this is advice you find on slashdot.

-pfl

Re:Beware cheap RAID5 cards!

[RedDirt]

I heartily second the recommendation for 3Ware controllers.

A couple of years ago I replaced a software mirror with a 3Ware 6200 card doing the mirroring. The card has performed flawlessly since that time although I've upgraded the drives on it a couple of times. (I do wish that there was some way to grow the size of the partition once you've upgraded both drives to a bigger size.)

Despite rock-solid performance, I decided to upgrade to Serial-ATA to clean up some cabling issues in the server (one of the IDE ribbon cables blocks about 1/4 of the fan on the second CPU). I looked at the available hardware-RAID controllers and there seemed to be only a choice between Adaptec and 3Ware. I opted to be a cheapskate and purchase an Adaptec 1210SA. *DON'T* Though they claim Linux support on the box, what they actually mean is that they provide binary drivers for a couple of releases of a couple of distros. Want to use RedHat 9? Sorry, they haven't packaged up a driver yet although there was recently a drop for RedHat 8! *rolls eyes* I fought with it for a couple of days before I broke down and ordered a 3Ware 8506 which has worked perfectly for me (although it was nearly three times the price of the Adaptec).

I guess the bottom line is that you get what you pay for. I wonder why I always end up trying to go cheap and re-learning this lesson ...