Reply to: Archive Media

[Sysman]

A friend of mine has just had his NAS corrupt the data on his backups, even though it's RAIDed. RAID will only protect your data if the drive dies cleanly and wholly.

There is an interesting article about "bitrot" here.

Yep. RAID is NOT a substitute for backups.

I can't get over how many people don't seem to realise this.

RAID controllers themselves have been known to throw a wobbly and corrupt your disks beyond all hope.

[DirtyDog]

A friend of mine has just had his NAS corrupt the data on his backups, even though it's RAIDed. RAID will only protect your data if the drive dies cleanly and wholly.

There is an interesting article about "bitrot" here.

[doodab]

If it's long term backup with infrequent access then perhaps Amazon Glacier is an option.

Nah, physical hard drives are still much cheaper. I don't need access anywhere via the net, nor the hassle of uploading it all and teaching my mum how it works.

[eek]

If it's long term backup with infrequent access then perhaps Amazon Glacier is an option.

It is a backup (I would still want to have another version elsewhere as well).

[SpontaneousOrder]

If it's long term backup with infrequent access then perhaps Amazon Glacier is an option.

[vetran]

Why such a surprise? Hitachi Data Systems make serious SAN systems and are probably the only such vendor who also make their own HDD. They certainly have the expertise.

wasn't my experience a few years ago.

[doodab]

blimey hitachi most reliable?

Why such a surprise? Hitachi Data Systems make serious SAN systems and are probably the only such vendor who also make their own HDD. They certainly have the expertise.

[vetran]

blimey hitachi most reliable?

[barrydidit]

Dunno how relevant this observation is, but as a non technical type I can follow some of what is being discussed here so... how technically minded are the people who are going to have to use this solution?

I'd expect that a physical 'box' would be the easiest thing to understand and if ever there is a problem then it's something which can be taken to find someone who can help. As has been mentioned, this can be duplicated to mitigate any loss from fire/theft etc.

Is that a consideration in this instance?

[Sysman]

These guys were recommended to me recently

Online Backup & Data Backup Software | Backblaze

Looks cheaper than Amazon. BTW, Dropbox is based on Amazon S3 so I heard

EDIT $5 per month for unlimited storage !

Speaking of BackBlaze,

Because Backblaze has a history of openness, many readers expected more details in my previous posts. They asked what drive models work best and which last the longest. Given our experience with over 25,000 drives, they asked which ones are good enough that we would buy them again. In this post, I’ll answer those questions.

BackBlaze article: What hard drive should I buy?

Of course they are talking about most cost effective in the context of a large fleet of drives. I take the view that with the small number of drives I have spending a bit extra is probably worth it.

[Sysman]

I have a 1Tb USB external drive plugged into my NAS, and it backs up all my accounts, music and photos at 3a.m. every morning.

Some really important stuff I stick in DropBox too, which means it gets spread over 3 machines as well.

I duplicate stuff across 2 main machines, one with a 2TB USB disk to cope with work in progress and the other with 3 x 1 TB USB disks which I rotate.

I really ought to get some extras because this lot is a few years old now.

P.S. I don't have masses of videos/music/photos so the above is quite adequate.

[doodab]

Heard another scare stories about Drobo to run a mile from it (the idea that the only way to recover from a failed Drobo box is another Drobo box rather put me off).

That's true of most hardware RAID solutions though. They all use a propriety format for metadata about the configured LUNs and layouts. Certainly with LSI & Adaptec cards you can't just pull a drive out of a set and expect it to be readable elsewhere, and of course with RAID 0 and especially 5 there is no way you're going to plug the drives into another random RAID card and have it work. I'd expect most RAID NAS to be the same.

I don't think people really think about this when they stump up the cash for a NAS box not realising it's probably more likely to give out than the drives are. That's why I've never bought one (well that and being able to get an 8 port LSI raid card for less money )

With software RAID you should at least be able to split a mirror and mount one of the drives elsewhere, as long as it's a compatible OS.

[jmo21]

Nice post by Scott Hanselman on this subject

The Computer Backup Rule of Three - Scott Hanselman

[eek]

Strictly speaking, you should buy the same drives from different suppliers, rather than buying in pairs. Statistically, drive failures will be more common in drives from the same batch, so you want to make sure that the drives come from different batches. This may be taking the protection thing a bit far, though

The Drobo drive was good for this - you can mix and match drives at any time, and they automatically split things out for you. Drive sizes don't need to be the same, so I have a couple of 1TB, a couple of 1.5TB and a 500GB drive in the same array.

Heard another scare stories about Drobo to run a mile from it (the idea that the only way to recover from a failed Drobo box is another Drobo box rather put me off).

I use unraid simply because it ends up with a set of reiferfs drives. The most you lose is the data on the failed drive (and even then only if multiple drives die at the same time).

Offsite storage is a different matter and I use S3 for that directly....

[Pondlife]

The external drive I got recently (WD Duo) has 2*3tb drives with the option of using them as 2 single drives, striping them, or mirroring them.

By external HDDs I meant the little usb ones where RAIDing isn't really practical as I won't have them both plugged in all the time.

But yes, I have a NAS that offers the same and so I mirror them.