RAID1 versus regular backups or both?

[Fred B]

I use raid 0 for speed

C-ssd
D-ssd ro

The backups are made by hotswap to HD and contain photo s, movies and audiorecordings ,Both basicly inreplaceble .The photo s are ofsite backuped by family .most are family photo s/movies anyway .

Also keep a low priority backup from the main os ssd , that is xp and isn t easy to instal .It is a multieboot pc with W7 and xp both seperate ssd and hd , W7 is mainly for the making of partitions and backing up xp properly . Made a clone from The C drive to hd , always handy🙂

 

[Zxian]

For a data drive, you definately don't need sophisticated backup software. I have a scheduled task that runs robocopy on certain directories every 6 hours for that sort of thing. I only use imaging software for the system drive.

Unless your robocopy script is keeping previous versions of your files, it's no substitute for a proper backup software (or ZFS snapshots, if you're so inclined). What happens if you delete a file or it becomes corrupted? Robocopy's clone setting (which is what I'm assuming you're using) will delete the file from the backup destination as well.

 

[Nec_V20]

I use raid 0 for speed

C-ssd
D-ssd ro

The backups are made by hotswap to HD and contain photo s, movies and audiorecordings ,Both basicly inreplaceble .The photo s are ofsite backuped by family .most are family photo s/movies anyway .

Also keep a low priority backup from the main os ssd , that is xp and isn t easy to instal .It is a multieboot pc with W7 and xp both seperate ssd and hd , W7 is mainly for the making of partitions and backing up xp properly . Made a clone from The C drive to hd , always handy🙂

The secret of backups is redundancy.

So you are running RAID1 or backing up to another hard drive in your expensive system and your cheap PSU that you got for a bargain suffers a power surge that it passes to your hardware (because those cheap PSUs treat your hardware as a fuse to protect itself from dying) and fries your hard drives - OOOPS

You get around this by backing up the expensive system to an expensive external drive or NAS but again the infinite wisdom which dictated that the cheapest PSU around was just fine and dandy decides that it has had enough fun frying hardware and decides to catch fire whilst you are out and burns down the house (and your external hard drive and NAS) - OOOPS.

Back in the day when I worked as Senior German Engineer for Enterprise Disaster-Recovery Tech-Support we would get reports of people who made their backup tapes and put them in fireproof safes. They then had a fire and in the aftermath they recovered their safe. The papers were still in pristine condition, but their plastic tapes had melted.

What took the biscuit for me personally was in the days after 9/11. I got a call where the person was trying to recover servers lost when the twin towers went down. I asked, "Do you have any off-site backups to restore from?". The person who was obviously still in shock and not thinking straight said irritably, "Of course we do, we have an excellent backup regimen". I then asked, "Where are they stored?", and the person replied, "In the basement vault". So the off-site backups were safe and sound in a vault crushed and buried under millions of tons of rubble.

What all the examples above have in common is that they had one point of failure.

So folks you have to think about and prioritise your backups.

Make more than one copy of data you really cannot replace and distribute those copies so that there is not just one point of failure.

Do you need to back up something like your game? No of course not, that is not irreplaceable. Your saved games however are a different matter.

When you actually think about your backups from the standpoint of what is vital as opposed to what is just convenient THEN you will start being prepared for the worst case scenario.

 

[smitbret]

I don't know why anyone really uses RAID 1 at all, especially if they have a good backup plan in place. If you have backups, just restore from your backup. Most home users can handle the 2 hours of downtime.

If you absolutely can't stand down time or have the budget for redundancy, just go with a RAID 5, RAID 6 or something similar. It's a much more efficient way to spend your money.

 

[brshoemak]

Similar experience with another company. D2D2T backups. Tapes were for offsite but sit in a bin under the on-site servers.

As for me at home I have a RAID1 setup (not a backup, just saying for informational purposes), everything is backed up to an external drive and also backed up to Crashplan (1.5TB).

For my most important documents (financial, legal, etc.), besides being backed up to the external drive and Crashplan - I also have Dropbox installed on my laptop, my wifes laptop, and my parents let me install it on one of their computers 800 miles away.

Basically for me to lose my most important data, all of Crashplan and Dropbox data centers would have to be destroyed, my house would have to get hit by a meteor along with a similar natural disaster occuring at my parents house. I don't think there is much more I could do.

I also have a VM on a dedicated ESXi server running as a secondary Crashplan server so if my physical server dies, I don't have to wait for 1.5TB to download again - but that's not a backup, just laziness.

 

[paperfist]

Octopuss,

RAID 1 is a reasonably good protection from drive failure. It's not a very good protection from:
1) Viruses
2) Hacking
3) File System errors and R/W corruption
4) Natural Disasters
5) Power Surges (often related to 4)
6) Human/Operator Errors (has been known to happen even during the re-building of a RAID1 array!)
7) Theft

Off-line and off-site back-ups can help protect against all of these IN ADDITION to protecting against drive failure.

I'm surely overlooking something, but if you backup your data to another device can't you still suffer from 1 - 7?

I'm building an office computer right now that will start to house everything digitally so I'm really worried about loosing data. I was thinking of using 2 SSDs in RAID1 and then an external HD and software to backup the RAIDs.

Is there a better alternative to the external HD?

 

[Turbonium]

Add another vote for RAID 1 != backup.

I used it for years thinking it was, but really, it isn't. Any flaws/problems/errors, not even counting things like viruses etc., will be transferred to both drives.

 

[Essence_of_War]

I'm surely overlooking something, but if you backup your data to another device can't you still suffer from 1 - 7?

I'm building an office computer right now that will start to house everything digitally so I'm really worried about loosing data. I was thinking of using 2 SSDs in RAID1 and then an external HD and software to backup the RAIDs.

Is there a better alternative to the external HD?

Yes. It can. It is much less vulnerable to those things since they're unplugged.

For example:
1)/2) Viruses and Hacking - if you acquire a virus, or a hacker invades and worms their way through you computer chewing your HDD into swiss cheese, your raid1 mirror will copy that in real-time. Your unplugged system snapshots/back-ups will not.
4)5)7) - some back-ups can be kept unplugged, and off-site. If your back-ups are not near your primary computer, they're less likely to be stolen (and they can be secured in safes!). If they're unplugged they can't be surged. If they're not at the same site as your originals they are less likely to be subject to the same disaster risk.
6) - unplugged back-ups, or at least incremental back-ups, will allow you to un-delete, or un-save, or roll-back to previous versions of a file. Raid1 absolutely does not allow you to do this. Moreover, if you had a dollar for every human error that occurred during a raid-array re-build. Unplugged back-ups are your insurance against human errors.

What you really want to develop, if your data is important, is a flow of back-ups. Back-up as you work. Some back-ups can and should be kept near your work (to be able to utilize un-delete, recover from an array rebuild disaster, etc), but some should be rotated to a secure off-site location. Here's an example:

Here are two broad examples of what I'm talking about:
More philosophical
More practical, uses photography examples, but the same ideas apply to anyone with important data

 

[IndyColtsFan]

I am using Crashplan for one of my fileservers now. I am thinking about using it to offsite my backups of all my VMs and media servers. But with the media server it would be funny to have to wait about 3 months for the sync to be complete. I can upload about 110 GB/day with FIOS 75/35.

I've uploaded about 1.5 TB of data to Crashplan for my initial sync. It has probably taken 4 to 6 weeks on 60/5 internet connectivity and should be done today. Note that if you back your VMs up to Crashplan, you need to snapshot the VMs first and then back the snapshots up to Crashplan. They won't support VSS for VMs.

 

[Dark_MadMax]

Like many said "raid is not a backup" but the again you would be surprised how little space the actual important stuff takes ( important such as documents/ irreplaceable source code/etc) - you can store this on any cloud storage even for free (google drive)

Now when you run large drives at home its typically for stuff it would be annoying and time consuming to replace (movies/music/pictures/installed games/etc) ,but its too expensive to regularly backup especially considering its unimportant

I settled for software RAID1(windows7 mirroring) - doesnt depend on any of your hardware components (like motherboard raid controller), if your entire rig dies and just one drive is good you can take this drive to other machine and have it running immediately with no hassles. Replacing the drive is also super simple, you only need 2 drives -many benefits

ohh and "hard " drive" failures - as in you cant recover anything are extremely rare. In corporate settings drive failures dont matter (since all servers run raid +hot spare, important user data is on servers) on home pc most data can be recovered in majority of cases, it just takes some time and knowledge, so most people dont even bother to try. there are so many cases where people just reformat their HD in the case of simplest hiccup

 

[aigomorla]

Again... to clear confusion....

Backup -> if main system was to go nuclear... you could scrap it... and reinstall...
Backups are typically NOT on the same system as the drive being backup'd.
They are typically off site... meaning NOT inside the host PC.

Fault Tolerance... Means as it means... the system can take more abuse then normal.
RAID 1 is fault tolerance, because it requires 2 drives to fail instead of 1 b4 you require a BACKUP.

A true RAID backup would be ON ANOTHER SYSTEM and not the same system being backup'd.

The secret of backups is redundancy.

+1
everyone who i have asked has said just this.
Its backups for your backups for your backups, to backup. 😛

but its nice to have fault tolerant backups, backup'd to another fault tolerant backup, which is backup'd from another fault tolerant backup.

ok now my tongue is twisted so i'll end it on that.. 😛

6) - unplugged back-ups, or at least incremental back-ups, will allow you to un-delete, or un-save, or roll-back to previous versions of a file. Raid1 absolutely does not allow you to do this. Moreover, if you had a dollar for every human error that occurred during a raid-array re-build. Unplugged back-ups are your insurance against human errors.

if the RAID is on another PC, it can be shut off, and turned on only when required to backup, or be used as a source of backup.
And a Intel ICHR RAID1 Backup station is far more fault tolerant then any flash drive, because u can migrate ICH Raid onto another ICHR family board without a complicated rebuild.
The big difference tho is the space... a full PC will take up quite a bit of space vs a simple flash drive.