Might Flash Memory be a Viable Backup Medium? 84
General Books asks: "Rather than fuss over mechanical failures and damaged media, why not use flash memory for backups? We maintain about 100 servers distributed to customers' sites. Each night we copy a backup of critical data (generally less than 128MB) to removable media in case the hard drive fails. We have experienced high failure rates with CDRWs and so now I am considering some sort of flash memory like a USB key drive. They are solid-state and you can get a 128MB device for $20. They seem ideal to me, but I can't find solid evidence. One question is how would they endure a lightning strike (perhaps not as good as an optical medium)? Admittedly, there is a wide variety of CDRW drives and media but don't they all seem risky compared to a solid-state device? More info about my circumstances: We have no network for backups. A second hard disk is not viable because it could not be rotated offsite. Tape drives are relatively expensive and overkill for our volume of data."
How about CD-R ? (Score:3, Informative)
Lightning? (Score:2)
Given that when you aren't actively moving data onto / off this thing it is supposed to be in your pocket or on your keychain, if it gets hit by lightning then 'data retention' is going to be pretty low on your list of concerns.
external HD (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:external HD (Score:2)
You never use a device like a HD for backing up critical data.
You see, tapes themselves are pretty robust, the thing that is most likely to fail is the tape drive - which can easily be replaced. If a HD fails, what are you going to do, transplant the platters onto a new spindle? *LOL*
Re:external HD (Score:2)
Ever used an exabyte on a sun? At least I wouldn't trust my data to it, if I didn't have a backup somewhere else... Even floppies are more reliable...
As all media, tapes and tapedrives come in different qualities. Just saying that it's "tape", doesn't mean it's secure.
If a HD fails, what are you going to do, transplant the platters onto a new spindle? *LOL*
And why shou
I don't do offsite backups (Score:5, Funny)
When that place burns I want to be sure all the evidence goes up in smoke.
Re:I don't do offsite backups (Score:3, Funny)
This guy's worried about LIGHTNING hitting his backups!
I figure if that's what happens, you were supposed to lose that data!
Questions (Score:3, Interesting)
I think a RAID will suffice. Locally. If you need to keep it on the cheap, pump your small amount of data to 3 other simple boxen offsite. I mean, for small amounts of data, there's no reason to muck around juggling the physical medium. One can duplicate that data faster and more reliably than boxes of little memory cards with scribble on them.
If you need to go cheaper, try floppies! W00T!
mug
Re:Questions (Score:2)
If you need to keep it on the cheap, pump your small amount of data to 3 other simple boxen offsite.
They "have no network for backups."
Re:Questions (Score:1)
Re:Questions (Score:2)
Carry the flash memory on you (Score:3, Funny)
Rotating HDDs (Score:3, Interesting)
Much cheaper in the long run, in terms of media costs, at least for large quantities of data. Especially if you score some inexpensive smaller drives (like a surplus batch of 10 GB or so)
Hell, if you went all the way and just put an inexpensive RAID controller in there, it might pay off in the simplification of your backup procedures
Here is one made by 3ware [3ware.com]
Here is one made by Promise [promise.com]
There are plenty of other, cheaper ones out there, too
Re:Rotating HDDs (Score:2)
The disadvantage of flash is it has an estimated limit of one million writes that could be reached quite quickly doing backups. why not invest $20 in the hard drive caddy's?
Re:Rotating HDDs (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Rotating HDDs (Score:2)
Dropping hard drives? While definatly a risk however it is minimal when you work in a profesional shop like mine.
Re:Rotating HDDs (Score:1)
Why, because you have 3 inch thick foam padding covering the entire floorspace, or because you all wear sticky gloves?
Re:Rotating HDDs (Score:2)
Re:Rotating HDDs (Score:2)
I don't buy it. That doesn't give you any protection. It's each cell in the flash chip that has a limit, not the entire chip. If you fill all the keys once a day you can use the card for 1000 years (Something else will probably happen to it by then, but you get the picture). It doesn't matter if you fill them all at once or you fill them in 160 little bursts.
And don't give me any crap about FAT wear. Just because you *can* do something stupid like use FAT16 on a f
Re:Rotating HDDs (Score:2)
Re:Rotating HDDs (Score:2)
There's a simple solution, though: USB/Firewire external drives have support in the drivers for hot connection and disconnection. Usually you have to click an icon to tell the drivers to prepare, but after a moment you'll be permitted to remove such a device. "But!", you say, "that's an extra power supply an
I've had no luck with Flash Media (Score:5, Informative)
Alex.
Re:I've had no luck with Flash Media (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I've had no luck with Flash Media (Score:3, Interesting)
Alex.
Re:I've had no luck with Flash Media (Score:2)
Re:I've had no luck with Flash Media (Score:2, Interesting)
Thanks for any info....
-m
Re:I've had no luck with Flash Media (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I've had no luck with Flash Media (Score:1)
Re:I've had no luck with Flash Media (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I've had no luck with Flash Media (Score:2)
--This may slow things down but at least all your writes will be committed.
Re: Keychain in XP (Score:1)
I use Flash PCMCIA cards as HDs on my laptop (Score:2)
NarratorDan
Re:I use Flash PCMCIA cards as HDs on my laptop (Score:1)
Does anyone know the magic number for this, or is th
Re:I use Flash PCMCIA cards as HDs on my laptop (Score:1)
So, you are extremely unlucky if you get less than 10,000 write cycles. A million should be about right, more is good luck :)
Re:I've had no luck with Flash Media (Score:2)
Re:I've had no luck with Flash Media (Score:2)
CF cards shouldn't get wet! They have plenty of space inside for moisture to linger. You got lucky. If I got a CF card wet and it didn't work after blowing the holes dry, I'd crack it open and rinse the innards with alcohol, then try again. I've got pics of the insides of a CF card on my photo gallery [rtor.net] under the Tech albu
Been there... (Score:3, Interesting)
We had a lot of bad luck with CDRW's and ended up dropping that idea and moving to a dual backup system. We do intremental backups to CD-R's and make two copies. Secondly we push the content to an FTP site that is elsewhere on campus. The FTP site is backed up seperately onto tape as added an precaution.
Just my $.02
Er, wait. (Score:4, Informative)
Before you give up on CD-R/CD-RWs, try this:
I don't see any reason why USB flash media wouldn't work for backups if the OS supports it. The only problem is that USB flash media is more expensive then CD-Rs. $20 will buy you enough CD's for a monthly 'archive' (12 CDs/1 per month), plus a weekly backup/incremental daily backup (4 per month), even if you don't reuse the weekly backup media (personally, with the cost per CD, I wouldn't). However, to implement such a system with USB flash drives (assuming $20/drive), would cost $320 dollars.
I love my USB flash drive, but its not cost effective for backups.
Re:Er, wait. (Score:2)
Can someone confirm this? This sounds like the bullshit that some audiophiles spout in reviews of hardware.
Re:Er, wait. (Score:2)
Explanation:
A CD is a collection of pits, and the reflective quality of each pit is in a different range depending on if the bit is a 0 or a 1. A CD burner uses a dye in each pit, and the stronger laser in a burner chemically changes the reflectivity of the dye. At higher speed, less time is spent on each pit, which allows less energy for the chemical change. At lower speeds, more time is spent on each pit, which allows more energy for the chemical change. (At least for CD-Rs, CD-RWs don't use dyes a
Re:Er, wait. (Score:2)
Which is why the higher speeds use a more powerful beam to compensate.
Re:Er, wait. (Score:2)
Sweetwater Sound [sweetwater.com], a seller of professional studio audio equipment has written several articles in their InSync [sweetwater.com] newsletter, including this one [sweetwater.com].
They don't give a technical reason why, but their experience (which I trust) is that different burn speeds produce different bit-level error rates (BLERs) and most drives seem to have their lowest BLERs at 2x speeds (surprisingly, not 1x). These shouldn't affect data discs, since ISO-9660 incorporates
A few things more... (Score:2)
2) Buy a lot of CDs, and not only back up the CDs, but have a schedule where you regularly duplicate older copies onto new media. CD-Rs can have short lifetimes (and can be damaged during handling). Check your md5sums after each bu
No problems with CD-R/W (Score:1)
On the subject of flash media, I haven't heard of any tests saying they have any real reliability. They were created to share files easily and quickly, not for long term storage as CD media (in theory at least) was.
Huh? (Score:3)
Close enough... (Score:2)
http://shop.stor
The 256 is about $50-55, 512 is avail for less than $100.
It's a pretty good deal they have going now adays.
How about... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How about... (Score:1)
Appearently you can actually boot from the iPods, although the older models with built-in FW connectors were easier to carry along to the serverroom.
Limited writes (Score:4, Informative)
Is the "generally less than 128MB" before or after compression? A nice compression package like 7-zip [7-zip.org] might get the files down to a size that can be emailed off-site each night.
Re:Limited writes (Score:2)
Re:Limited writes (Score:2)
That's odd. Flash sees heavy use in routers [cisco.com]. When I was an engineer for a Tier 1 provider, being conservative and cautious always meant saving more often, not less :)
:)
Oh, by the way, if you think Flash is bad for a storage medium, some Juniper routers have an LS-120 floppy drive for backup [juniper.net]
Re:Limited writes (Score:2)
Re:Limited writes (Score:2)
I'm not talking about consumer-grade devices that aren't reconfigured often, I'm talking about "production" equipment used as regional aggregates, that have T-1 and DS-3 and other cards hanging off them, that get updates every day as new circuits get put in, existing circuits get changes in IP routing, interfaces get shut down because customers don't pay the bills or get caught spamming, etc.
Devices that might see
Re:Limited writes (Score:2)
Re:Limited writes (Score:2)
Have you tried going to Cisco's website and looking for yourself? Oh, wait, silly me, I forgot this is Slashdot.
Here you go. [cisco.com]
Oh, and here's a link for Juniper [juniper.net], also.
A backup has to be reliable. It doesn't have to be fast, because it's not where the config actually runs. That's RAM, but there's no need for it to be battery-backed, because you always save your config... don't you?
Re:Limited writes (Score:1)
Absolutely. They all do. If you were making high-end routers, you would do.
Do you think AT&T (or any other big service provider) would buy a router that might lose all of its configuration data as a result of a dead battery? Do you think they could afford the maintenance costs of routinely checking and replacing batteries in all of their routers worldwide? We're talking thousands
Compact flash is designed to distribute writes (Score:2)
How much difference? (Score:2)
If most of that data isn't changing, you could use those antique things called phone lines to transmit the differences.
Re:How much difference? (Score:2)
There's this thing called a 'mo-dem' that will send data down the phone line for you. It's not very fast, but if you're rsyncing 128M of data you might only need to transfer 10-20M every night to keep the backups in sync..
More info please! (Score:2, Insightful)
An extra hard drive and cron works wonders on a Linux or Novell server. I assume the task scheduler and a set of
Flash memory and remote backup (Score:3, Informative)
Rather than fuss over mechanical failures and damaged media, why not use flash memory for backups? We maintain about 100 servers distributed to customers' sites. Each night we copy a backup of critical data (generally less than 128MB) to removable media in case the hard drive fails.
Both of these would be my recommendation. I use flash media to boot firewalls, routers and embedded servers that run from RAM drives (nearing 100 deployed at customer sites and in our network). But I automount a partion on CF modules for logs. Flash memory is very reliable; it's rated at about 100,000 destructive writes. Read that as wiping it out, reformating it, not as I wrote to /var/log/messages for a week and the media toasted because somebody's machine caused the firewall to log crap every 2 seconds for a week. If it wasn't reliable, Cisco wouldn't use it for non-volatile storage (neither would I).
The way we handle server backups is for servers to backup via a script to a tar.gz file over a private T-1 for servers. Granted, this amounts to a lot of GB for us but if you use something like rdiff-backup [stanford.edu] or a more simple script that backups up your files across the net through an SSH tunnel, you should be in pretty good shape. CDRWs are a poor choice if you can't or won't rotate media routinely. Especially since their lifespan for writes is low. You or your customer will have to rotate if you use CDRWs.
Paper (Score:3, Interesting)
in case the hard drive fails? (Score:1)
most of the restores i've ever done have been because some clueless user has accidentally deleted a file, three weeks ago, and only just realised they need it. if you're continually wiping out your old backups then you're fucked.
don't think "what do i want to backup?" think - "what do i want to be able to restore?"
Google (Score:4, Informative)
You can read the Compact Flash FAQ [compactflash.org]
A quick google search returned these links, that may be interesting to you
IDE to Compact Flash Adapter [acscontrol.com]
Flash Storage Solutions [allmatics.com]
Read all this thread if you will be storing sensitive information [derkeiler.com]
How Compact Flash can keep your data safe? [hp.com]
This guy [kenrockwell.com]has an opinon different from mine. He says that, all of a sudden, he lost hundreds of picture. Well, I've been working with Compact Flash for more than one year, now, and the ONLY time I gost corrupted data was when I took the card off the camera while it was writing. Then the camera could not read any picture. They seemed to be lost. But later I put that CF in my CF reader, and ran a chkdsk. It found lost chains, that I saved as files. And recovered ALL pictures except for the bottom half of the one it was writing at the very moment when I removed the CF. It probably corrupted the FAT (same way as hard disks, when the computer is not properly shut down).
And I do think CF is more reliable than Microdrive.
Re:Google (Score:2)
Now there's an understatement. Solid-state versus a tiny little hard drive. Drop both into your pocket without any protective cases, let them bang up against each other, your keys, loose change, and the side of your desk as you swing into your chair, for a few weeks. Step on them accidentally (on purpose) when you change clothes at the gym, or when you're at home with your honey (Slashdot regulars excluded) and in a hurry to undress...
Microdrives are c
Easy backup plan (Score:2)
Re:Easy backup plan (Score:2)
Re:Easy backup plan (Score:1)
Re:Easy backup plan (Score:2)
M-Systems (Score:2)
You could try M-Systems [m-sys.com]'s products like DiskOnChip [m-sys.com] or even their IDE/SCSI Flash Disks [m-sys.com].
I'm working with embedded systems (Linux) in my company and I'm very pleased with the DiskOnChips despite their half-proprietary driver with which you can only generate kernel modules, not compile it into the kernel for legalese reasons. The DiskOnChips work way more reliable than any other flash chips I've used so far, with no defects yet (and we use them just like normal hard-disks currently).
Granted, it could be just
Lightning survival... (Score:2)
A USB flash device, left plugged in to the machine for days at a time, would be connected to the PC's power supply during such a strike and might sustai
Zip Disks (Score:1)
Re:Zip Disks (Score:1)
Then you got lucky. Most of the time, inserting good media into a click-of-death drive would result in damaged media. And damaged in such a way that insertion into a new drive would damage it (resulting in more click-of-death.)
I personally have never had click-of-death problems in my Zip drives (I own four, and regularly use 6 or 7 - mostly 100M drives, but one is a 250.) I once had the drive click a lot on
Go magnetic (Score:2)
In my personal experience, all of them have been more reliable than optical or flash media.
Since you're talking about less than 128M per backup, I'd seriously consider a Zip-250 drive. They're fast and
You should also be able to get an inexpensive tape drive. The old DAT/DDS-1 standard stores 1.3GB on a cheap 60m tape, which more than enough s
Backup to an FTP site? (Score:1)
Any type of medium is good (Score:2)
Since your backup is 128meg, you should factor a backup medium that has some room to grow. What do you do if one night your working late and your backup is 135meg? Skip it and wait for the next day to buy another key? So lets up your USB key to 256meg.
CDRW's, lets say they fail every 20 uses. 365 days a year, 20 uses per disc. That will be ~19 discs per year. @ $40 per 25 pack. $40