Storage Think your safe because you have RAID?

Oh God.. I give up. People, this was the point of this thread: RAID is not back up! There's no point in JUST having a RAID array and thinking you're safe. Even if you have RAID5, or even 6, you should back that RAID array up.

Ok.. you back up to a non RAID device... but does your back up have a back up? THAT'S my point! Whether you use RAID or not... have a two tiered (or more) back up system!

If you back up your RAID5 or RAID6 array, RAID is still a great thing to have as it's redundant... it can survive a disk failure... that's its ONLY purpose.. not as back up. Your RAID should still be backed up elsewhere.

 

OK + Cloud storage.

How many residential customers have offsite facilities?

I'm trying to think what software could automate a backup to two separate PCs. You could run the main interface off something very skinny, but dedicated to network throughput, then have two beefier mini-ITX LGA1155 systems with RAID cards in them for 6-8 disks a piece. It's days like this I wish I knew how to code

 

Not many, but you can still have a small ITX based system hidden away somewhere. Thieves will not spend time looking in hidden away places.. they'll grab the shiny things and run. Having a NAS in the attic, or somewhere will protect you from that. Lots of people have a garage though... and that's where my mirror server is (hidden away).. so I have reasonable protection from a house fire too. But as for theft... there are still lots of ways to mitigate that.

Cloud storage is great, but its slow. Doing the incremental back ups to cloud would be OK, but once a week I do a full back up... and that's around 300GB on average. That would take too much time, In fact, it wouldn't be finished by the time the next scheduled back up begins. It would still be useful to simply dump valuable files on there though.. although initially it would take ages.

 

Gotta be an external drive then, take it to work and leave it in a draw, then take it home over weekends. Or, two external drives - that way if there's a fire on the weekend, the other external drive is still in the office!

So time to build my fantasy box with two removable HDD ports!

 

I think this is what confuses people:

Back up is a copy of you data in a different location.
RAID duplicates you data in some form or other.

Now too truly back up your data most people would be fine with off-site cloud based backups.
(need a good upload rate, i.e. real Internet service)

Now this is a slow way to back up.

So we stick a RAID 1 server in the middle and that backs up to cloud say once a week (time frame depending on your preference)

Now to secure your RAID server just use a auto shutdown script to turn off the server when there is a disk failure. (with all this back ups you should have a spare ready to use)

Now for the person using USB keys to back up. Please make sure you are using a very premium USB key and not the cheapest you can find, those thing die on my all the time, either way I would suggest upgrading to an SSD if I where you.

 

Act of God and thats all your data, just return to your cloud based goodness. If you are really paranoid use two cloud based storage services on different continents......

 

Just remember to find out where these storage cloud replicate there data too, and make sure that they ONLY replicate to data centres within the EU, especially if the data your sending up to this cloud service is sensitive.

 

I'm upgrading the home server hopefully this week to WHS 2011 and will be setting up RAID, I take monthly backups on the 1st of each month to a USB Hard drive which is then left in my draw at work.

I also have a cloud backup that runs every night updating files that have changed with the option to restore files if a user deletes them.

So I would say I'm covered when drives die although If I had unlimited funds I would go all out on a SAN, Second backup server, 2 week Backup drive rotation etc etc. xD


I suppose it's a case of how much does this data mean to you on how much you are willing to spend to keep it safe.

 

you need two RAID 6 drives in RAID 1 with eachother then use a NAS drive to back that up and then spend all week backing up the NAS drive to the cloud
job DONE lol

 

Redundancy isn't enough imo, you're still putting all your eggs in one basket. It's also just simple maths: 1xHDD has a% risk of disk failure, 6xHDD has 6a% risk of disk failure - home RAID is an expensive and impractical solution.

 

Doesn't quite work like that. If this was the case, if your disks had a 20% chance of failing in the first year, the array would have >100% chance of having a failure in that year. This, as you can see, doesn't make sense.

Of course, don't forget that with RAID5 data loss doesn't occur until the second failure, and the third with RAID6.

 

I think it's time to invest in moon-based storage and microwave transmission.

 

Hmm I see a lot of craters on the Moon

 

Have you not seen where Pookeyhead's error email originated??

 

Each of our PCs has a RAID1, then we dump to laptops for semi-important stuff, a 1TB backup server, a 1 TB backup drive that goes with us (no theft then) and hard copies of anything priceless (like our son's pictures. Those even have multiple hard copies.)

Working on putting a RAID10 in my setup, but drive prices won't play ball.

 

Good to see some fairly robust solutions being used. Just common sense... more than one back up, and have them on separate machines or devices.

 

I'm still a big fan of on a disc

Sent from my HTC Sensation 4G with Beats Audio using Tapatalk 2

 

I worked in servers. Come on folks, of course I would have a good storage solution.

 

Perhaps I just misunderstand the issue, but I don't see how you would face a total loss if "Moon" had been your only server. Since it is a backup, wouldn't all of your data still be on your local drive, ready to be backed up to the rebuilt server?

 

A large financial organisation (read: well heeled with lots of critical data) data protection regime typically isn't far off...

- High availability datacentre (either local HA, or HA datacentre pairs perhaps 5 miles apart)
- Another local datacentre (<50mi) with synchronous replication for disaster recovery (synchronous = writes aren't committed at the primary site until they're replicated to the secondary site)
- Another remote (>50mi) datacentre for asynchronous disaster recovery (to cover against regional disasters, with a slight impact to RPO)

- Application or disk level snapshot at the primary site for very quick recovery
- Disk based "traditional" backup at the primary site for relatively quick recovery
- Backups sent offsite over the wire for remote recoveries, and for the sake of offsite backups
- Offsite backups de-staged to tape for an extra level of warm fuzziness, either kept at the secondary site, or more often vaulted to a third party