RE: Re: [OT] Backups

["Dave Sussman" <davids@xxxxxxxxx>]

I tend to lurk more than post, but thought it worthwhile chipping in
with my opinion, having gone through some disc trauma recently. My main
server (Domain controller, Exchange, music server, etc) had an 8 channel
RAID card, configured with two arrays:

1. RAID 5 (3 * 160Gb + 1 hot spare), C drive, holding everything.
2. JBOD (4 * 500Gb) - DVD rips

Drives are in 2 IcyDock caddies.

I also had another single drive onto which I did backups - an xcopy of
my data, plus an NT Backup of data + Exchange in a daily/weekly/monthly
schedule.

While away there was a failure, possibly caused by the power supply,
leading to multiple disc failures, in turn leading to the loss of the
array - it wouldn't rebuild. The data is safe, but my backups were also
partially stuffed, for no fathomable reason; the daily and weekly just
wouldn't restore. No biggie since I also had the data elsewhere. I've
lost a few non-critical things, my music will need re-ripping (over 1000
CDs - sigh), but it's not the worst job.

I've always been a big believer in RAID 5, but when it fails completely
you're almost in a worse position. I've now rebuilt the machine using a
standard IDE drive as the boot drive and will image that (Acronis
TrueImage) making recovery very quick. The RAID drives will be mirrored
instead of RAID 5, allowing easier recovery in other machines (or on
other channels).

On my day-to-day work machine (which I xcopy to the server) I also use
Mozy. I'm also thinking about Drobo (http://www.drobo.com/), which looks
quite sweet. My view is now to use disc imaging for quick restoration
and multiple backups for redundancy. Mozy handles the offsite, although
I may well start dumping everything to a USB drive and taking it
offsite.

So yes, don't rely on RAID; make sure you have plenty of backups and
make sure you can restore from those backups.

Dave


-----Original Message-----
From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Andy Davies
Sent: 04 June 2007 10:10
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ukha_d] Re: [OT] Backups

I've always seen RAID 1 or 5 as being for resilience so in theory they
allow
you to reduce downtime when there's a failure, I see them as being
complimentary to rather than as a replacement for backup.

I tend to backup the stuff that changes frequently onto DVD, and larger
files  that change less frequently e.g. music etc., onto USB drives.
Having
read this article: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/007624.html
I'm
contemplating doing some of the frequent backups onto Amazon S3 instead.

Andy

On 03/06/07, liakakos <ukha@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> If you've got offsite backup too, RAID 1 or 5 is a
> total waste IMHO.
>