On Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:44:15 -0000, krw wrote:
In article ,
says...
On Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:34:04 -0000, krw wrote:
In article ,
says...
On Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:11:06 -0000, krw wrote:
In article ,
says...
On Wed, 12 Nov 2008 18:44:19 -0000, Clint Sharp wrote:
In message , William
Sommerwerck writes
My next computer will have integral RAID, and I won't have to manually back
up again, ever. (Except possibly Really Important stuff, just to be safe.)
With respect William, part of my job is recovering data off
failed/corrupted RAID sets. Do not rely on RAID to keep your data safe,
if the chances of two disks failing in a RAID 5 set then I must be the
luckiest (they weren't my RAID sets) man alive because I've seen it
dozens of times in the past 5 years. If you value your data then back it
up somewhere safe.
Use RAID 6. You have TWO redundancies.
Still doesn't protect you from the loose nut behind the keyboard.
And you can add some hotswaps too.
That's essentially a backup scheme, not significantly different
than cloning drives.
Never used a hotswap, but I'm assuming that they are idle empty drives which will automatically take over any other which fails.
No, they're cold standbys that can be "swapped in" with power on
("hot").
(Your word wrap is broken.)
YOU wrap it. I don't kow the width of your monitor.
Err.... so how does that differ from me having several spare drives
sat on the shelf that I can put in when required? I thought the
idea was these were put online AUTOMATICALLY. The option I saw
to add a hotswap on one of my raid controllers seemed to imply
that I'd set up one of the drives that was plugged in to be one.
No, "hot swap" has nothing to do with backup. If you have spare
drives sitting on the shelf they're not much use when your data goes
away. You *can* use the hot-swap feature with a RAID array to do a
backup by having the array perform the mirror then unplug the drive
and stick it on the shelf. By itself, hot-swap doesn't do anything
for you.
Correction - I meant to write a hot SPARE, not a hot SWAP.
Why would your spare need to be "hot"? I think we're talking past
each other...
I assume it's a drive which the system can bring into play as needed, immediately one fails.
RAID ("mirrors") will take over automatically on failure,
but again, they don't solve the "loose nut" problem.
One of the simple solutions is to have a mirrored setup with
additional mirror drives left off-line. To do a backup, one
connects one of the off-line drives and the system builds a
"clone" of the original drive on the "backup" drive. Then take
that drive off line and put it out of the reach of the loose nut
(fire, system crash, whatever). TO restore the system, simply
reconnect the mirrored drive and rebuild the system drive as a
mirror of the "backup" drive.
That's a good idea. Although I wouldn't do it with a cheapo onboard
controller. Those things fall over sometimes when drives "fail".
Huh? "Cheapo" RAID controllers are nothing more than *ATA ports.
If a drive fails you still have the other.
If they were nothing more than *ATA ports, you couldn't make a RAID array with them.
With "my" proposal you
still have one "hot" and another, with the backup data, sitting on
the shelf. The *ATA controllers haven't gone anywhere.
My point is I've (more than once) seen ONE drive fail, then the controller is incapable of using a degraded array and corrupts everything.
Trouble is, the machine I'm about to build is planned to have 4
drives in a RAID 5 array for speed aswell as resilience. How
would I back this up in that manner? I suppose I'd need 8
drives - a mirrored RAID 5?
Don't do RAID-5. If you want speed do Raid 1/0. You're going to
need two drives for the striped pair though. I wouldn't run a
striped set though. Too much risk with too little gain.
Do you mean RAID 1+0? As in a striped mirror? Why would this be faster than a RAID 5?
I do something functionally the same, but don't use RAID of any
sort. I back up my laptop (using the supplied utility) once a week
to a USB drive that's online whenever I'm docked (also used for
music archives, etc.), then copy that drive to another USB drive
once in a while.
I have three machines on a network on all the time. So the main one
is backed up to the other two automatically every night. Every so
often I use a USB drive to dump one of the backup copies onto and
hide it out of reach of the computers.
We have two systems (our laptops) that get backed up to USB drives.
The desktop never gets backed up (nothing important ever gets put on
it). I don't lose sleep over losing data and can't be bothered with
the network.
The network is automatic. It's no hassle at all once it's set up.
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