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Data Storage Editorial

Best Redundant Storage for Home Use? 101

Posted by Cliff from the as-bits-replace-paper-and-tapes dept.
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."
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Best Redundant Storage for Home Use? More

Best Redundant Storage for Home Use?

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  • Just buy a matching drive (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    And buy a raid card, and set it up and go. Many new motherboards support RAID of some sort onboard these days. Depending on the drive, it shouldn't cost you very much money at all. I'd store data on the RAID, and keep easily replaceable things (like applications) on another drive.

    • Battery backup (Score:5, Informative)

      by skinfitz ( 564041 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @04:30PM (#7340865) Journal
      If you buy a RAID card with on board cache make sure the cache is battery backed up otherwise a power cut may corrupt your array. Some of the cheaper cards don't have battery backup.
    • If you're going to do IDE, don't bother with those 'winraid' cards like promise, et al.

      check out these - no drivers required, nothing fancy, and if one disk dies, it automatically switches to the other...

      http://www.arcoide.com/index.html

  • SCSI drives I used Linux software RAID. Worked well all the time until drives started dying.
    I switched to Escalade 4way IDE card and could not be happier. I have about 800GB now on my home server.
  • Its not an ideal solution (what is?) but drives get bigger and cheaper all the time; just upgrade a bit more often than you would, keep a couple in the computer and rotate the others as offline backup... one or two may die, but they won't all die
    • 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

  • Hard drive replacement (Score:5, Funny)

    by mopslik ( 688435 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @04:30PM (#7340871)

    Despite my hard drive's dedicated service, I'm aware that it will someday fail.

    In terms of storage efficiency, nothing beats the naggy girlfriend:

    • Reliability -- remembers each and every one of my mistakes, without fail.
    • Rapid access time -- often points out my faults within milliseconds.
    • Built in redundancy -- all too eager to discuss the same topics releatedly.

    The downside, though, is the insanely high maintenance fee. Noisy too.

  • raid != backup (Score:5, Insightful)

    by honold ( 152273 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @04:36PM (#7340924)
    raid only provides availability. if your fs gets hosed, you delete a file, or whatever you're unable to undo the damage. ditto if your pc gets burned or stolen.

    if you want a real backup, make a real backup. if you want to do it cheaply, buy another drive, copy the contents of your data drive to it, and store it someplace safe. buying an external usb2/firewire enclosure will make this a lot easier.

    • Re:raid != backup (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jungd ( 223367 ) *

      This is basically the solution I use. I have a cron job that unison/rsync's my files to the USB2 external drive every night. It also mirrors to my PC at work to provide location redundancy (it is 20miles away).

      • It also mirrors to my PC at work to provide location redundancy (it is 20miles away).

        Out of curiousity, have there been complaints from your ISP about the amount of bandwidth your backups are consuming? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding and you only do offsite backups periodically instead of nightly. Just wondering...
        • What kind of crappy ISP would complain about keeping your connection pegged?

          Besides, he's using rsync. He's only transmitting deltas. He could probably do it nightly over a 56k dialup if he has a moderate daily workload, and is careful to only back up nescicary files (i.e. source code with no objects, etc..).

        • Re:raid != backup (Score:4, Insightful)

          by zulux ( 112259 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @05:10PM (#7341267) Homepage Journal
          Out of curiousity, have there been complaints from your ISP about the amount of bandwidth your backups are consuming?

          Unison and RSymc only trasmit the things that have changed, down to the file level. They are quite efficent and I use both the backup up small offices over 56K without a problem.

          Say you had a Quickbooks file that changed, instead of copying over all 28 megs of the file - Unison/RSync only copy the small bits that changed.

          So if you only have a 56K connenction - you can seed the backup physically, but a 56K should be fine for 10 users with normal useage paterns.

          BTW - Unison uses the RSync diference engine internally.

  • Raid stuff (Score:5, Informative)

    by whois ( 27479 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @04:40PM (#7340972) Homepage
    I run a 6x120Gb software raid here. The redundency is nice but when you get that much storage in one place you start having other concerns.

    Drive failures are scary. Note, if you're going with a hardware highpoint 1540 controller: forget raid 5. The array takes forever to rebuild (like 4 days) and sometimes fails midway though causing total data loss. (Other people may have different luck though, my friend is doing hardware on 4x160Gb and not enjoying it). I've had 2 drives fail on my software raid and the rebuild went well enough. I suspect the failures were due to inadequate power from the UPS causing a "brownout" condition when my power went off, since both failures happened after a power outage.

    So other problems: thats 600Gb of disk space. Nobody in their right mind wants to sit through an fsck, so a journalling filesystem is needed.

    but, all the journalling filesystems are new and untested. New your saying? They're a few years old.. and yes, thats true but they're new in comparision to all the other filesystems. And when you're talking about 600Mb of data on one filesystem it really starts to concern you.

    (Even so, I've been running raid 5 with journalling on 4 to 6 drives for the last 1.5 years or so and haven't had filesystem corruption)

    A friend of mine is running mixed drive sizes in his fileservr and doing no raid. He occasionally has failures and loses stuff, but at least he doesn't lose everything. Still, I'd be pissed if I lost an 80 gig chunk at a time.

    The problem with raid is, you gain some redundency but you completely lose the ability to make sensable backups. Unless you're a corporation and can afford $3k for a tape drive (and an additional $500 for tapes) you're faced with the idea of mostly redundent, but no backups. Offsite backups become really appealing, but then you need to shell out the same money for drives that won't be put to use (until something happens)

    I still don't have a solution for offsite backups.

    As an aside, I started playing with encrypted partitions (not raided). That has the same sort of scaryness. One filesystem screwup and you lose everything. No backups unless you have a second hard drive. Then you're faced with raid 1 which would corrupt both drives, or copying the encrypted volume from drive to drive each night.

    I've got no answer for that one ethier, except that encrypting a tape backup would probably be good in a corporate situation.

    • >>offsite backups
      In my setup, I designated one folder on the Samba server for all the stuff I absolutely cannot live without (about 300MB) and I have a cron job to tar | gzip | encrypt with gpg | scp to the remotely hosted server I have account on. Works pretty well. If there is fire at my house, loosing home videos is not as bad as loosing business docs, source code, tax files, etc.
    • I have a 6x75Gb RAID5 (Promise SX6000 card), net space is 275Gb in the data partition (O/S is running on an 8Gb partition).

      So far, I've lose the entire array once in just 6 months. Win2000 decided to randomly corrupt about 1/10th of the files on the disk.

      Hmmm, having a 275Gb single drive is nice because you don't have to worry about where to put stuff... but I'm not sure I'd do it again as one big drive. I think the next setup is going to be mini-ITX servers, each with a 120-180Gb RAID1 remote mounted
    • Solution: get one 300+GB drive, put it in another computer and backup the important stuff to it. Sure it's not as redundant as the RAID array but it's your backup, some backup is better than none =)

      Also if you want a mature journaling FS use basically any of the linux ones except Reiser. All the others are either ports of old stable codebases (XFS, JFS), or simple journaling addons to the venerable ext2 (ext3), with ext3 you can still mount the drive(s) as an ext2 volume if need be.
    • but, all the journalling filesystems are new and untested. New your saying? They're a few years old.. and yes, thats true but they're new in comparision to all the other filesystems.

      I don't know where you got that from - filesystems like XFS have been proven on multi-terabyte arrays supporting mission-critical applications. I'd take XFS over an old-fashioned non-journalled filesystem like UFS (or ext2) any day.

  • Beware cheap RAID5 cards! (Score:4, Informative)

    by SteWhite ( 212909 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @04:41PM (#7340980)
    OK, my own experiences in this area:

    I was looking for a basic, cheap RAID system to give me some redundancy.

    I got an Adaptec 1200A RAID Controller card, and used two drives in RAID1 mode. This served me well, until I needed more capacity - RAID1 has 100% wasted space.

    So I looked at RAID5. I got a Highpoint RocketRAID 454, because it was cheap. BIG mistake. The write performance, on my P4 2.8 Ghz, with three WD1200JB drives, was a terrible 9 Mb/sec, with 80-100% CPU usage. AVOID. I returned it then next day.

    Now I have a Promise SuperTRAK SX6000. It's very nice, 25 Mb/s write with only 20% CPU thanks to RISC processor, but expensive.

    In summary:

    If you want RAID1 only, a nice cheap Adaptec will do fine. If you want RAID5, you will need a reasonable card. Promise do some cheaper ones than the SX6000, with less channels, you could look at those.

    Hope this helps!

    • Re:Beware cheap RAID5 cards! (Score:5, Informative)

      by GoRK ( 10018 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @05:02AM (#7345639) Homepage Journal
      That's because you didn't actually get a hardware RAID card with that Highpoint piece of shit... The way that card (and the cheaper promise ones) work is that they have a ROM on there that handles Int13 disk access via the BIOS (for OS loading and whatnot).. but your CPU still does all the work -- it's software raid stored in the card's firmware.

      When the OS loads, the card's driver takes over, doing software raid there..

      beware your last statement, though -- the cheap promise cards that claim raid 5 ARE NOT HARDWARE RAID! They will experience the same problems as the Highpoint card you described.

      I wish there was some sort of convention that distinguished this kind of nonsense, but there isn't.. Promise's higher-end IDE RAID controllers are OK, but bang for the buck -- some of the best IDE RAID controllers out there come from 3Ware. I use a lot of them with much success..

      ~GoRK
      • 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

  • What do you want to accomplish? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bluGill ( 862 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @04:43PM (#7341009)

    You need to determin what you want to accomplish first. I've taken the stance of creating paper copies of everything on my computer that I care about (until my printer broke...), which works because it is only a small amount of financial information. Everything else can be re-constructed, or just forgotten about. OTOH, I want my grandpa to have a better backup system because his computer holds family tree information. (He also has a lot of historical information that isn't in the county archives but should be)

    So first you need to take inventory of what you have. All those illegal mp3s can be downloaded from the net again. Your OS can be re-installed from CDs or the net, as can all your applications. All those jokes that you are saving can be found on the net. All those short stories that you have created can be published on your website at your ISP, and re-downloaded from there. (Make sure you keep this up to date two way, ISPs don't always backup websites) Usenet is a good palce to publish that, and google will archive. Family pictures belong on your website for the family to see.

    That leaves a small amount of private data. Is it still an unreasonable amount to burn this to a CD/DVD? If so invest in tape backup (which is expensive, but holds more data).

    Do not forget off-site storage for all this, a fire will destroy your home including the computer and backup. This is the biggest problem I have with RAID.

    • Re:What do you want to accomplish? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @01:23PM (#7359775) Homepage
      Indeed.

      I don't know how effective it is, because I'm glad to say it hasn't been tested yet in practice, but for about five years I have been organizing the directory structure of my hard drive entirely by recovery strategy. That is, in simplified form... anything for which the recovery strategy is "reinstall from manufacturer's CD" goes in one top-level directory. Everything for which the strategy is "copy directory from backup CD" goes there... and so forth. Another category is "external documents," which are, in effect, hierarchical storage: the "real" documents life on the web, or on CD-ROM's, and are, in effect, being cached for quick reference on my hard drive.

      The directory labelled "Created" contains every file that I have personally created as the result of performing keystrokes and mouse clicks. Believe it or not, after more than five years it all still fits easily on a single CD. DOing this sometimes requires fighting the applications and OS that sometimes have their own idea of where things should go, but I fight the fight.

      One directory labelled "Keys" gathers together all of the various codes, CD labels, activation codes, registration codes, shareware-nag-disabling codes etc. that are needed when reinstalling software. To my surprise, I currently have well over fifty of them.

      Backup is complicated, and the data on my hard drive falls into different categories for which different kinds of backup are needed. It's lovely when the technology stars happens to align for a while in such a way that there's a cheap, external, removable-media device that happens to be about the same capacity as your hard drive and supports fast reads and write, but that only happens for brief, shining moments.

      Most difficult and annoying problem: there is NO POINT in doing a backup unless you have a way to verify that backup and unless you DO verify the backup. My biggest complaint against tape backup systems is that in my own limited personal experience, whenever I have run a verify on a tape backup I have gotten an error-free verify less than 50% of the time. (And, no, verifying by using the tape drive's "read-after-write" feature is NOT the same as verifying the tape in a separate run; not even close).

      I'd add that if the backup software you're using has any kind of tricky system with wildcards and pattern-matching, for specifying what directories to include or exclude during the backup, you need to spend some serious time verifying THAT. Setting these things up is like doing a global search-and-replace with regular expressions. It seems simple but it is extremely easy to make a mistake resulting in the omission of things that you thought were being backed up.l
      • One suggestion for cases where you expect to have read-back errors on the backup medium is to add additional information that will let you recover data even if some of the data is corrupt. So by adding 20% to the amount of data you're backing up, you'll be able to fully recover all of the data as long as no more then (roughly) 15% of the data is bad. (The extra 5% is overhead for the recovery files.)

        Right now, QuickPar is one of the more popular solutions. There are command line version and the tool is

  • Buy old equipment (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @04:49PM (#7341076)

    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...

    • > Anything short of a house fire

      You say this mostly in jest, perhaps, but a house fire is the thing that most
      frightens me in terms of data loss. Hard drive failure would be bad, but a
      fair amount of my *most* important data is on more than one physical drive.
      Still, a house fire would take it all. The prospect scares me. I've got a
      few CD-Rs offsite, but it's nowhere near enough.

      • Actually, I didn't say it in jest. I just figure I've got bigger issues than data loss if my residence goes up in flames.

        Under those circumstances, I'd only want to see myself and my wife get out alive, and I'd be very happy if I managed to save my cats as well. Anything over that is just a bonus - and I have relatives who will attest to that based on personal experience.

        However, you can always invest in a safety deposit box at your local bank, and put a tape in it once a week... or possibly set up a wi

    • I did this recently too (it's not quite up and running yet, but getting there).

      I was able to get a PIII Compaq server with 6-bay drive cage and a RAID card for ~$US500. The drives were pulled from another machine I bought that had 18 36GB U160 SCSI drives in it, so I've got plenty of replacement drives as well...

  • Tape. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by FreeLinux ( 555387 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @04:50PM (#7341082)
    I'm sure that the flames will now commence as many Slashdotters seem religiously opposed to tape. In fact a recent Slashdot artice cited some tech magazines prediction that tape was obsolete. But, tape is still an excellent storage medium.

    The fact is that tapes last for a very long time with a shelf life of at least decades. Most especially when they are not used much, as is the case when tape is used to backup a hard drive and is only accessed again if the hard drive fails and a restore is required.

    Tapes store much more than any other removable storage medium. CD-ROM and DVD can't hold anywhere near as much as most tapes can.

    Tapes do not cost too much, contrary to what many people say. Right now, on eBay, Travan 8GB drives start at US$5.00 and DLT 30/70 GB drives start at US$50.00 and go on up to >US$300.00. The tapes themselves can be more expensive especially when one chooses the preferred new tapes but, again eBay has DLT tapes available for anywhere form US$2.00 to US$100.00 per tape.

    You suggest that you may choose to use RAID. But, tape is still a better alternative. RAID is effective in protecting you from a single drive failure but, it does not protect you against accidental deletion, rogue applications, viruses, versioning or controller failure. On the other hand, tape and the right backup strategy can protect you from all these issues.

    Almost always tape backups are the best alternative.
    • I've heard that the Decades shelf life is not quite the case. Never had a chance to find out first hand, though.
    • Tape blows. At work we now do an overnight compression of (3.2Gig of) user data and it gets bunged on my iPod for off-site backup the following night. Four days are kept on the server, two weeks on my laptop and monthly snapshots are burned to disc (CD if it fits, DVD if it doesn't) at the beginning of each month to be put in a fireproof safe. Look Ma, no tapes.
      • I don't know if it's just me, but I found some of the data on my DVD-Rs is not longer accessable. How often do you check the DVDs and CDs to make sure that you can still read the data? Did you ever do research to show that the media you bought will last for as long as you need the backup?
        • Given that only about 10% of the data changes from month to month and we never used to take monthly snapshots at all, I'm not too concerned about the life of "r" media at this stage. (If I was, I certainly wouldn't be using my Plexwriter Premium to fit 830MBytes on a 700Mbyte CD. :)
      • Fireproof safes are only "fireproof" because, when heated, they saturate the contents with liquid. (Wet paper has a higher combustion point than dry). While a little water shouldn't hurt your CDrs, the high temps inside a fireproof safe are likely to destroy them fairly effectively.

    • Re:Tape. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by pfl ( 216803 )
      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 [gnomemeeting.org] 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 [sourceforge.net]

      Of course DV tapes are a non-standard solution, longer tapes do not exist ye

      • That reminds me of, a while back, a company selling high quality Sony betamaxes for storage. Seemed like a nifty idea.
    • While I agree that tapes are the best general backup solution, don't count on 10-year shelf life. Not only does changing drive technology contribute to the problem, the actual magnetic tapes, particularly higher density tapes, don't last so long. still, I agree with what you say - it's hard to beat an inexpensive 2nd-hand tape drive, even if you use all new tapes in it (a good idea).

  • 2nd Drive (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @04:55PM (#7341137) Homepage
    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.

    • ...some hardware issues. Like, for example, when the drunk kid two blocks down rams a power pole and knocks out power for a few days. Silly me, it turns out that my surge protector didn't--I had to replace the power supply and EVERY DRIVE in the system (HD, DVD, CDRW). Not a happy camper.

      Yeah, that's pretty rare, and preventable if I'd taken more precautions, but if your data is really that valuable, it needs to be backed up somewhere outside the same computer case--maybe outside the home, depending on y

    • or accidently typing "apt-get upgrade" twice in a row.
      # apt-get upgrade
      Reading Package Lists... Done
      Building Dependency Tree... Done
      0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

      # apt-get upgrade
      Reading Package Lists... Done
      Building Dependency Tree... Done
      0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

      What's the problem?
  • Get two external, USB2.0 hard drive enclosures. Get two hard drives equal in capacity to your old one, and put them in the enclosures (actually, you can use just one enclosure and store the hard drives in padded plastic shipping bags when you're not using them). Periodically clone your hard drive to both of the external drives, and set the external drives in a safe place. I think it would be extremely surprising if all three drives were to fail at once. In fact, it would be shocking.

    Anyway, this is pretty

    • Make sure the drives are different brands. It is plausible that the drives would fail because of a manufacturing fault.

      • Actually, that's happened to me! My work PC two years ago had IBM drives in it. Both crapped out on the same day, and I was basically fucked. I had been backing up my work to the second drive (DOH!). Since then, I've been extremely fanatic about keeping a zip disk handy, bringing my backups home, and burning CDs every time I get up to 500MB of backup folders... Yeesh! Nothing like losing six weeks of work to inspire you to back that stuff up!

  • Use simple mirroring RAID. (Score:4, Informative)

    by stienman ( 51024 ) <adavis&ubasics,com> on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @05:11PM (#7341283) Homepage Journal
    I've been dealing with mirrored RAID cheap harddrives for a couple of years now on medium duty systems (in harsh environments), and I can tell you two things:

    1) I haven't yet seen a situation where both hard drives failed simultaneously so badly that I couldn't recover most* of the data.
    2) RAID is not a replacement for a good backup.

    No matter what, you should keep a seperate copy of the data at minimum separate from the computer itself, ideally offsite. You should also have a mirrored setup so a small failure (one drive, or fried computer with still working drive) won't set you back to your previous backup data.

    What I've done temporarily is use a HD caddy (but now I'd go with a USB 2.0 or Firewire drive) to take an occasional snapshot which I can take offsite, storing it in a different place.

    You should plan on expending at least $200 for a decent backup solution.

    Further, I suspect you overestimate your backup needs. Compression helps with most everything. If you are backing up movies, burn them to DVD and keep them offsite. If you are backing up programs, burn those to disc and keep them offsite. If you are backing up pictures, burn them the DVD and keep them off site. You only need to continually re-backup items that change over time, and that data is vastly smaller than what you think you need to back up right now, and generally can be compressed up the wazzoo.

    But you're looking for the easy way out. So, do mirrored drives, and try to get an external drive at some point later in time.

    -Adam

    *I did have lightening take out a server, which fried everything in that computer. I'm glad I had a regular backup. For kicks, I tried anyway, and one hard drives still worked, but a small portion of the data was corrupt, and it wasn't worth fixing since I had a known good backup from the night before.

  • external drive at a friend's house (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PapaZit ( 33585 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @05:13PM (#7341296)
    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.
    • 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.

      Ummm...this is slashdot, after all...so why are you assuming they even have a job?

    • That still doesn't count out hard drive failure. I know that hard disk technology has gotten pretty good and mean time between failure is increasing as the years progress. I still wouldn't bet my money on backing up to hard disks. Hard disks will still fail, and *then* ...exactly how are you supposed to recover that data. Tape backups seem to be the best way to approach this issue. They are pretty much durable. You can drop a data tape 3-4 feet from the ground and not worry since there are no disk pla

  • A brand new USB2 Travan 20/40GB external drive will run you $450. 20/40 tapes are $45.

    They're pretty fast (20MB/s), work with all modern OS, and can backup over a local network.

    If you have more than around 30GB of data that you need to back up regularly (aside from one-time dumps of your MP3 collection) then you have Enterprise-class problems, and shouldn't try to do things on the cheap. :)
    • Travan? Ick.

      If you want to trust your luck to Travan, go right ahead.

      A better solution would be dat or dlt. Spendier for sure, but so much more reliable. Travan is slow and unreliable.

      The best solution would be AIT, but spendy. Very fast, very reliable.
      • Yah, yah, yah. I wouldn't use Travan in a production environment, but it's fine for occasional tape backups. The tapes degrade faster over multiple read-writes than DLT, but for occasional use that's not an issue, and Travan is much cheaper than DLT.

        Hence my recommendation for Travan. The poster did, after all, specify *cheap*. :)
  • These days, for cheap, hotswapable raid solutions you have:
    1. External USB2 or Firewire enclosures with cheap IDE disks
    2. SATA drives with SATA drive caddies

    Combine the above with software raid.

  • IMO (Score:2)

    by E1v!$ ( 267945 )
    When it comes to RAIDing, I prefer to raid the kitchen.

    When it comes to backing up, paper + a good safe works well and has a longer shelf life than most computer media.

  • RAID, Tapes, and removable hdd's (Score:4, Informative)

    by Zaffle ( 13798 ) * on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @07:53PM (#7342627) Homepage Journal
    Ok, first, with RAID. There are, what I define loosely as 3 levels of doing RAID mirroring.

    Software RAID
    You are just looking to ensure that if one HDD goes down, you still have most of your data. Software RAID mirroring incurs large performance penalties. Oh, and do note that many companies produce "Hardware RAID" cards that aren't hardware raid. Its hardware ASSISTED raid. These systems can't, or have great dificulty booting root of a raid system.

    Hardware RAID
    Either SCSI or IDE. I've changed my tune about IDE RAID. If you do it in hardware, it is a pretty good and valid option. It provides increase in speed and ease of setup (in most cases, litteraly plug and play). 3ware are a good company for hardware IDE raid controllers. Also they are very well priced.

    Big hunking hotswappable SCSI RAID
    If you have money to blow, here's the best place to blow it. Here the RAID system (whatever level) is done with hotswapping drives. 99.99% of the time, THIS IS A WASTE OF MONEY. For most small companies, and a lot of midrange companies, hotswap is throwing money away. Unless your server NEEDS to run 24/7 with 5 nines reliablity, hotswap is a waste. Hotswap only offers the ability to replace a bad drive without downing the system. But if you want to spend the money, or like the look of the flashing lights on the cases, go for it.

    Ok, next, is RAID the answer?

    Yes and no. RAID (mirroring) protects against hardware failure. It doesn't stop anyone from typing `rm -rf /` or anything similar. So if you want backups against mistake, RAID doesn't offer this.

    Backups

    Unless you have money to burn, tape backups are expensive. Most of us have 20 or 40 gig HDD drives. If you try and buy a tape backup at this level, you are talking a significant ammount of money (eg possibily the same as the cost of your system in the first place).

    It is possible to do tape on the cheap, but not recommended.

    CD/DVD burners

    CDs hold 700MB of data (maximum), so doing a 20gb backup would require 29 CDs in total. This is probably not viable. So lets put that asside for now.

    DVDs hold between 2 and 4GB (depending on various hardware, etc). That becomes more viable. You wouldn't do a full backup each day with this mehtod (still requiring 6 dvds to do 1 full backup), but you can do it using a base + data method.

    By backing up the entire system on 6-7 dvds say once a month, you can then procede to do incremental backups over the month on 1 or 2 dvds (depending on how much you change). If you also are careful how you store your data, things that you want, but aren't likely to change. Eg your mp3 collection, you can backup to a seperate dvd, saving space on your incremental and full system backup.

    Removable HDDs

    The final option is, imho, the best. By having, preferably, 2 external HDDs (either using USB drive holders or the old caddy system), you can backup most, if not all of your system onto the removable drive. If you get removable disks that are the same size as your internal HDD, you can backup the entire system.

    The pros are obvious. The cons however may bite you. First, in theory, you can drop a tape on the ground and have no problems. Do NOT drop your remoable HDD. So you'll need to be careful. HDDs are also rather more volatile than tapes or CDs when it comes to keeping its data. You'll need to ensure that you store the HDDs in a good location.

    If one HDD fails (either a removable, or your internal) you'll be able to restore from one of the working ones. I said you should have atleast 2 removable HDDs because when you do a backup, the first thing you do is delete the old data from the removable. if the system failed then, you are screwed.

    I prefer this system, and for some SOHOs I offer it as a viable option if they need data backups.

    Summary

    Either way, in the end, it comes down to how much you are willing to pay. Backups are still NOT cheap. Its something that should change, but in the short/medium term, it won't.

    • I respectfully disagree with your assessment of tape backup as too expensive.

      I backup to a DLT4000 drive on 20/40GB media. Total cost of the backup solution $150 (SCSI card, media, and drive) via judicious (and lucky, I suppose) shopping on eBay.

      DLT is fast, portable, high MTBF, and very long shelf life. It has been used for business data backup for years and has proven itself.
    • I'd have to disagree with you on the performance of software RAID. I'm using a software RAID-1 (for the last 18 months) on a Redhat Linux system, that only has a pair of 200MHZ CPUs. The software RAID actually improved the (mostly-read) performance of this system, and had a negligible impact on the write performance. All the space on this system is in the software RAID-1 array (two 80GB IDE drives). I highly recommend this arrangement. I've had a drive fail, with absolutely no loss of data or impact to
  • We use the 1200A for our clients who are to cheap to go SCSI (or for home system). The 1200A from Adaptec works perfectly for us with Seagate/IBM drives, we have about 5 deployed with no problems. The interface is easy to use and setup is a breaze, I highly recommend it.

    Alternativly if you want to go a bit more high end the 1210SA (I think) is a Serial ATA RAID card. Hook that up to two Western Digital 10k RPM Raptors and you got some nice fast RAID, but not much space.

    Two things to note:
    1) As others have
    • I cannot speak to Adaptec's SCSI line but their SATA line is not at all Linux friendly. For the time being, they are providing only binary drivers. Want to use FreeBSD? You're totally SOL.

      Also, I've been using a pair of WD 1200JB drives on a 3Ware 6200 controller and they've been completely solid since I installed them about a year ago, so I'd be curious where you've seen problems with them.
    • I've got five WD1200JB's in a raid 5 configuration; they have been operating solidly for almost a year. What problems have you noticed using these drives for RAID?
  • This isn't ideal, but it meets my needs.

    I don't worry about backing up the OS at all since if I have some sort of crash, I will do a reinstall. It is more of a hassle, but when I do have a crash, it will be (hopefully) several years after my last install and I can clean house and start afresh. So the files that I am interested are personal files.

    My files are organized by those in my home directory (Documents and Settings/login on Windows) and others in /mnt. My home is relatively small and they contain fi
  • I've got a couple of StorageTek 9393-600 DASD devices that are 630GB of storage in RAID 6 for sale...

    admin@jkoebel.net if you are interested or want more information. They're pulls from the local school district datacenter, they weren't big enough.
  • This system only really works with small files (ie. text documents, small images, config files.. not really recommended for MP3s and divxs, or your 1gig outlook.pst file)
    Have a script that runs overnight, that zips/tars up all the relevant files with as much encryption/password as required.
    At work, have a script on your machine that ftp's in to your home ftp server and downloads the zip file.
    Rename it to something un-obvious (ie. sysconfig.dat) and puts it on your personal file share on the server.
    Work tak
  • This is a very broad topic, and I am going to assume that you use Windows. Maybe someone else has posted something useful if you use another OS. I personally use an old prosigina pII with piggy back 7 drive 9.1 GB SCSI RAID 5. This cost me about $200, as they thought the system was dead. It wouldn't boot (black screen with a single beep), I looked up the error codes and all it needed was a new CPU ;). I also use the Windows back up utility on a scheduled job to back up a folder that is the root for ever
  • Firstly, RAID is a data security option, not a backup option. If you delete a file or your house burns down, RAID won't help you.

    Having said that, I suspect RAID is what you're really interested in, because you're trying to protect more against unexpected drive failure than accidental file deletion or natural disaster, both from a practical and affordability perspective. If you're anything like me, you've got hundreds of gigs of data, but maybe only a few gigs that are *really* important and irreplaceabl

  • I have a software RAID5 setup under RedHat, for a small network (5 boxes) performance hit is non existent due to each drive having it's own channel.

    the setup:

    member partition size: 73.5GB (formatted size of 80GB HD:

    2x 80GB WD800BB drives

    1x 120GB WD1200JB drive (partition = size of other 2)
    1x 200GB WD200JB drive, ditto

    the whole thing forms a 220GB RAID5 array with about 120GB left over. the majority of the data is divx/xvid movies and such, mp3's programs, ISO's etc. The movies are backed up to CD (also
    • it's what i have to work with, i would like nothing better than a 4x200GB RAID array, but this is the best I can do. yes, the 80's are the weak link, but it's better than nothing. The entire setup yields boatloads of space (220GB in the array with over 130GB left over) the ~30GB portion left on the 120 drive (after system files) is used to store backups of the critical stuff (only about 5 GB is by most considered 'critical'), the Videos are mostly backed up on CD, though i'm waiting on a DVD burner to burn
  • Hello ALL, currently the IDEAL way to store data would be a DVD-RAM Carousel with say 100-500 discs. At 9.7 GB a disk, that's roughly 10 - 50 terabytes. Currently though, the only EBAYed DVD carousel I can find is the PowerFile c200. It's a DVD-R only carousel so it's of limited use (though it holds 100 discs.) I have been thinking, because that PowerFile uses 2 DVD-R drives, would it work if you remove the Dvd-r drives and swap them with DVD+RW and or DVD-RAM? DVD-RAM discs are ideal though because t
  • If at least one machine on your LAN is Mac or PC, you might want to pick up something like the Maxtor OneTouch. The 120GB version is only about $180 these days. This thing has USB2 and firewire, and a single button on the front that you push to fire up Retrospect software to back up a mac/pc.

    The nice thing is this button is programmable, so you can just fire off your rsync script to backup your other samba shares or whatever.

    Do a weekly backup with a single push of a button, throw the thing in your backpa
  • First question, that 100 CDs you are talking about, do you really need to back all that data up?

    I suspect that figure includes a bunch of stuff you might not need to backup. Myself, other than some files under /etc, and a couple under /boot I don't bother with OS files. Waste of time, I've established that I can flatline my Debian box at home and have it rebuilt to a virtual clone in reasonable time. Ditto application files, other than a couple rare exceptions.

    That's goning to be the most effective

  • I try to make regular backups of my "critical" data to CD. I have less than a CD's worth of data, so it's cheap, quick and easy to "backup early, backup often." The only problem is, I'm generating an ever-increasing collection of CDs. I have other random stuff archived on CD as well.

    A reasonable person would probably just throw out old stuff, and stuff that will never be used. But I'm unreasonable :)

    So what I'm looking for is an extendable, cheap way to store lots of CDs. I want something a little

    • I use CD cases, like those CaseLogic make. The ones I have fit 200 CD/DVDs and they aren't particularly expensive. I think the later models fit even more discs though.

      One thing that annoyed me with the CaseLogic cases was that you can't remove the sheets with the discs. This can make restructuring a major pain, so it's worth looking up before you buy.
  • I'm surprised that no one has recommended the Linux md driver. It performs extremely well even with IDE disks. You don't get hot-swap without special hardware, but you probably don't need that for a home machine

  • They're firewire drives right? Nice and portable. Just load it up with your backup and leave it at the office.

    No, I've never done it... wish I had the iPod to try it with though. =) Does regular drive access work with non-Macs?
    • I've used the XPlay software with my PC laptop and a PCMCIA Firewire card to have filesystem access to my iPod. Works pretty well once you get it set up. The XPlay setup on my laptop was a bit involved, but I think that some of that might have been due to the PCMCIA Firewire card, get a laptop with built-in Firewire and you may not have this problem.

  • I'm seeing a lot of answers about having a RAID filesystem, and then backup that. But what about the opposite?
    I mean, have a backup and then RAID it. How, you ask? Well, just make a disk image on a file, or whatever you call it on your OS, and then upload it to a safe computer which has RAID (1 or 5, not just 0) with enough space to backup all of the other computers (or the files on a special directory of each that keeps the important files), and have it all stored there. Then, at regular intervals you r

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