Back up to backs up?!

Mustang · 16th July 2008, 15:02

Where does it all stop?

I recently bought a NAS with RAID 5 to do a number of things:

1) Back up my hard drive.

2) Provide storage for all my digital pics and MP3's

3) Provide centralised access to the pics and MP3's so Mrs Mustang doesnt have to hog my PC to do anything with them.

All was going well until the NAS temporarily died and I had to re-install the operating system. Fortunately all my files survived!! (There is some higher power!

) The interesting part was that the support team from the NAS vendor calmly stated - "Sir we always recommend that our NAS units are backed up". This was despite having paid a few bob in the first place.

The question is, should i have to with RAID in use? How far do I go? I have a 2TB machine so backing up to CD/DVD would be tedious. The approach I would most likely take is to buy some USB hard drives and back up to that but thats more money!

~Craig~ · 16th July 2008, 15:06

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mustang

Where does it all stop?

I recently bought a NAS with RAID 5 to do a number of things:

1) Back up my hard drive.

2) Provide storage for all my digital pics and MP3's

3) Provide centralised access to the pics and MP3's so Mrs Mustang doesnt have to hog my PC to do anything with them.

All was going well until the NAS temporarily died and I had to re-install the operating system. Fortunately all my files survived!! (There is some higher power!

) The interesting part was that the support team from the NAS vendor calmly stated - "Sir we always recommend that our NAS units are backed up". This was despite having paid a few bob in the first place.

The question is, should i have to with RAID in use? How far do I go? I have a 2TB machine so backing up to CD/DVD would be tedious. The approach I would most likely take is to buy some USB hard drives and back up to that but thats more money!

Get yourself a cheap tape drive and hire milan to come round and change them.

Mustang · 16th July 2008, 15:08

Quote:

Originally Posted by ~Craig~

Get yourself a cheap tape drive and hire milan to come round and change them.

I cant afford his rates.....!!

Advocate · 16th July 2008, 15:15

RAID is not a backup solution, it's a resilience/redundancy solution.

If you accidently delete data, the RAID array will happily propogate that deletion....

But the NAS is a already backup (of your harddrive) so by using RAID you have a resilient backup solution (maybe, depending on how it's used)

VectraMan · 16th July 2008, 15:25

Quote:

Originally Posted by Advocate

But the NAS is a already backup (of your harddrive) so by using RAID you have a resilient backup solution (maybe, depending on how it's used)

From the sound of it he's using the NAS as storage, not just backup. Simple answer - make sure everything is copied back to your PC.

Perhaps two NASes with single hard disks is better than one with RAID. At least they won't cook themselves at the same time.

Anyone ever used ShadowProtect? I'm currently playing with it as a solution to backup to my NAS.

zeitghost · 16th July 2008, 15:39

Punched cards or paper tape.

It's the only way to be sure...

lilelvis2000 · 16th July 2008, 21:15

And unfortunately even backing up to tape cannot be guaranteed either.
As above RAID is just a redundancy solution. Our databases are on RAID that does not mean they are backed up. But it does mean that the database does not fall over if a drive fails.

I too have looked around for some tape drives capable of storing 200Gig+. They didn't look too cheap from the searching I have done.

vetran · 16th July 2008, 23:20

Most support backup to an external USB drive, slap one on, backup nightly using the NAS backup tool goes at full USB speed (well better than copying across the network).

Advocate · 17th July 2008, 07:36

Quote:

Originally Posted by zeitghost

Punched cards or paper tape.

It's the only way to be sure...

Still not fool proof, damn those humans!

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/A-Training-Issue.aspx

ctdctd · 17th July 2008, 07:49

If you want to minimise risk of data loss, take multiple backups and store off site.

RAID arrays can fail with data loss - and what happens if the house burns down?

For a large NAS device at home, I'd go for three USB drives. One for the backup, one in transit, and one off site. Or if rich, a tape drive and lots of tapes.

HTH