Yes, provided the backup raid part is added to the array and synchronized e.g. once a week on-demand while kept offline (unplugged) the remaining time. Such setup takes some scripting to require least effort for the human.
I do not see the need for back-up - IF the correct RAID mode is selected.
Incremental back-ups should be trivial to establish with a good back-up utility.
Di ba?! oo - i know konti lang tagalog!
The most common reason for going back to backups is a file incidentally deleted by the user. In my company the backuppc web interface gets accessed by workers for exactly this reason surprisingly often.
Raid is NO replacement for backup. Raid is a way to increase performance and reliability of the running system. Raid1 spares me of the hassles with copying from backups if one of the drives fails. But having the backup is still crucial.
It is. Yet how many people do that?
You are mixing up arguments / positions.
Yes a full backup is highly desirable. The OP does indicate he has numerous original sources already, however.
Yes incremental backup should be done. It is pointless to say that few people do it - their ignorance is their problem. Live and learn.
I am puzzled by your comments on RAID. Maybe you wrote too quickly.
You might wish to refer to an authoritative source.
[ not to say I know it all, but ............. I did work as an IT Manager for 20 years; 10 in Canada, and 10 in Asia. ]
Here is my system, growing all the time.
NAS, Switches, and Modem
Router, VoIP, baby switch
Start with the NAS If you notice they are all in pairs! (except for one, that is a scratch area for temp storage) That is because they are mirrored. So I have my files stored twice, redundancy in case of failure. Hard drives fail... not if, when. Disks are really cheap these days, what are your files worth? The NAS consists of those 4 white boxes, they are Seagate Dock stars, they have four USB ports each. I got them for $15.00 US each, they still sell them on eBay. They are SMB compatible so can be seen as a share on the network, they are also pogo plug, a bit of a pain, but handy in some respects.
The switches are 8 port Gigabit managed switches cheap on ebaybut fast and reliable. The SOHO stuff just did not cut it. So that's my storage.
My media is music, and videos. All of my CD collection is ripped into flac files I also have a large Grateful Dead and live music collection. I have my DVD collection ripped and stored and I have a dual TV tuner, use Media Center to record TV shows, MCEbuddy to remove commercials and shrink the files.
I access the video with Western Digital TV Live Plus boxes on my three TV sets. They allow me to play all my media as well as HULU and Netflix. I can play music too. For music I have a little atom based PC running Win 7 and Foobar. It has SPDIF and I also use USB.
SO with my setup I can watch a movie or TV hsow from all of my TVs and play music with my "music box". I also have this available on all the laptops my iPad and iPhone as well as my wife's androids.
I have built this system over the last few years and it is fairly bullet proof, works well and has a high WAF!
That's a home entertainment complex, nice
Will check some of that out more when I have more time, eg MCEbuddy (life is too short to watch ads), and Dockstar
Thanks
Full vs. incremental backups are just backup strategies. The important question is "is there any backup at all in case of need"
I am not sure I understand what you mean. Raid1 (mirror) can be used as a backup tool, actually a very flexible one. It allows to keep the backup synchronized up to the last moment of removing the backup drive from the raid array, while the backed-up machine is fully operational. But I am talking about an external drive being part of the raid array. That is why I mentioned the eSATA port of that HP microserver.
For specific details e.g. see my blog post Offline Copies for Central BackupPC server | Blog IVITERA a.s. . BTW that is my daily parttime job - IT admin in our company, for about 16 years now (the remaining part of the day I am trying to learn from our sales team). I just do not know if that is the authoritative source you have asked for
That backup stuff is all well and good, and don't get me wrong you NEED a backup strategy. But most of the SOHO stuff is crap and unreliable. Simple is always better. That is why I like my system of manually mirrored, cheap drives, shared on the network. It is a bit more work but so simple. I use a few scripts to manage it all, along with a sycro utility. Need to think of the end user in all of this, for an IT pro it's easy for us.
BTW here is my work system:
16 blade server rack, 132 Gb SAN. Use snapshot and data de-duplication for backup, but swear by good ol shadow copy for the day to day, "lost my file" calls.
136
BTW here is my work system:
16 blade server rack, 132 Gb SAN. Use snapshot and data de-duplication for backup, but swear by good ol shadow copy for the day to day, "lost my file" calls.
136
That is totally backwards. You need a backup strategy to implement backups, otherwise you are just jerking around.
perhaps you can share your scripts............
Not sure what you mean by 'manually mirrored'
I'll agree that anything coming from MS is dubious.
Give me UNIX or give me eternal torment!
Honestly, I do not know where you are heading. You started with
and now you have come to insisting on developing specific backup strategy prior to doing anything. Do you actually want to offer any specific technical solution?
My suggestion for the OP: If you can afford to have one of your machines running 24/7, just add a drive to your PC, get an external USB/eSATA drive for backups (e.g. cobian backup for windows) and be done with it.
If you want to buy a NAS, get an inexpensive but reliable low-power PC (x86) with multiple SATA ports instead, have someone install linux on it (e.g. OpenMediaVault), backup the data to external eSATA drive once a week using e.g. rdiff-backup. Once your drive is full, you can at any time add a new drive (one or two) and start using raid, or replace the internal drive with a larger one (no reinstall required, of course).
That is what I would do.
1 - Abundantly clear to me when read in context.
2 - backup a couple terabytes over USB?
There are countless multiple TB USB3 external drives. Also USB2 will work, just will take a bit longer. On the other hand if the copying occurs on the filesystem level the drive does many more seeks and the overall speed drops significantly anyway.
BTW that is why we create the offline copy at block level - raid synchronization which runs at full drive speed. Our backup server has over the years accumulated a few hundred million files (mostly hardlinks) currently on 4.2TB array. Weekly synchronization of that to two RAID0'ed eSATA drives takes about 5 hours, thank to the write-intent bitmap of linux mdadm. HW is HP ML115, the lowest entry level available.
Yes and why not?
It's cheap, 3.0 is pretty quick. I had a drive die a few weeks ago, took 22 hours to replicate it. Even so I only had to start it. It is the initial copy that may take a while but after that even moving a few Gb around doesn't take that long.
Check out the Silverstone Grandia GD08 HTPC case.
SilverStone Technology Co., Ltd.- GD08
This case can hold 8 x 3.5" HD's + 2 x 2.5" HD's + 2 x Optical Drives (Blu-ray & DVD).
With the correct mobo or 2 RAID 5 cards, this can can hold up to 24TB (8 x 3TB) of media or 16TB (8 x 2TB) of media. Throw a couple of SSD's in the 2.5" bays & have a FAST Monster media server. You could even use one RAID 5 network for Audio & the other RAID 5 network for video. This case can even accomadate a Huge dual-slot video card.
This is the HTPC case I'm ordering with my income tax refund.
MLStrand56
SilverStone Technology Co., Ltd.- GD08
This case can hold 8 x 3.5" HD's + 2 x 2.5" HD's + 2 x Optical Drives (Blu-ray & DVD).
With the correct mobo or 2 RAID 5 cards, this can can hold up to 24TB (8 x 3TB) of media or 16TB (8 x 2TB) of media. Throw a couple of SSD's in the 2.5" bays & have a FAST Monster media server. You could even use one RAID 5 network for Audio & the other RAID 5 network for video. This case can even accomadate a Huge dual-slot video card.
This is the HTPC case I'm ordering with my income tax refund.
MLStrand56
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