Comments on: Super Storage Solutions?

By: Greg Kennedy

Greg Kennedy — Sun, 03 May 2009 18:10:45 +0000

What about using a software RAID instead?

By: Brent

Brent — Sat, 02 May 2009 20:54:13 +0000

Perfect example of what Brian and I are talking about here. RAID controllers just add another point of failure to your backup. That is not something that you want to do when you are talking about IMPORTANT backups. Run very fast from RAID for backup.

By: Stephen B

Stephen B — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:35:53 +0000

I used to really like raid – until I had a faulty raid controller fill up several of my Maxtor drives service areas (g-list) with false drive errors a while back. Once that happened, I could no longer access those drives. I still use raid, but I do not rely on raid. Luckily, I had most things backed up.

By: Brent

Brent — Fri, 01 May 2009 13:32:52 +0000

$100 for 1TB is pretty good, especially for a brick and mortar store. They have been going for a bit cheaper on Slickdeals every once and awhile, but not that much cheaper.

By: Dean

Dean — Fri, 01 May 2009 03:42:30 +0000

thanks for the heads up. Im now making a back of my backup for a backup that I will keep at my mother in laws. Today me and the wife chewed over this thread and went to best buy and brought a 1TB drive. it was $100.
I dunno if it was a good deal or not I think it was about the going rate. Just wanted to get things going before the laptop gets stolen, the house burns down or blown away.

By: Bob Archer

Bob Archer — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:59:55 +0000

Amazon’s Cloud Storage? http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/aws-solutions/#backup

======= it says:
Backup and Storage

Even as storage becomes more plentiful and affordable, youâ€™re still faced with the task of managing your growing storage infrastructure. Amazon Web Services provides a cost-effective solution for storing information in the cloud that eliminates the burden of provisioning and managing hardware. The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3â„¢) is storage for the Internet. Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. With Amazon S3, you get a highly scalable, reliable, fast, and inexpensive data storage infrastructure that enables you to deliver cost-effective and dependable backup solutions. Thousands of customers already use Amazon S3 as their personal backup location, and several more customers deliver compelling end-user backup, storage, and disaster recovery solutions using Amazon Web Services, including:

Backup and Storage Case Studies: 37signals, Altexa, BeInSync, ElephantDrive, Jungle Disk, MediaSilo, MyOwnDB, Sonian, Zmanda
========

But I don’t know if it’s feasible for the amounts you’re getting into. Or if content might violate the TOS. :) And with all that you’d need a really fast upstream connection. In addition to getting over the reservations one might have trusting their data to a ‘cloud’ storage solution.

By: Brent

Brent — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:52:38 +0000

Again, I repeat, STAY AWAY from RAID for any long term storage solution. In 5 years when your controller is fried and you need to move your RAID volume to a new controller, you are going to be wishing you had listened to Brian and me.

RAID is a redundancy/high availability solution and is not a good backup solution at all. It also increases the risk of accidentally wiping out both your original copy and the backup because it is a blind copier. If you write bad data to your volume, it automatically gets replicated to the entire volume. So if you go with RAID you are still going to have to have a tertiary drive for backups of the RAID drives. Why bother buying 3 drives to do essentially the same thing you could have done with two drives? Performance on long term storage is not a factor, so the last remaining benefit of RAID is pointless for you as well.

RAID is good if you want to increase read performance of your disks (and don’t care about write performance since that can even go down in RAID setups) or if you want to ensure that a mission critical environment does not go down because of the loss of one or more drives (depending on how many drives you setup, you can have a higher fault tolerance). None of these things seems to be important to you in your environment. It would take you a few minutes to swap out one of your backup drives to be the primary in the event you lost a disk in a non-raid setup. And then you would only be without a backup for whatever amount of time it takes you to buy a new drive. Your downtime would already be minimal and you would be keeping your points of failure as low as possible.

If you are serious about data loss, then ditch the RAID completely and make all the drive stand alone.

The usable capacity of a RAID 6 array is (N-2) * S, where N is the total number of drives in the array and S is the capacity of the smallest drive in the array. So, which do you think would provide you a better level of data security? One volume of 4 disks or 4 seperate disks each with their own individual copy of the data set? I will take the 4 copies every time personally.

By: juba

juba — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:47:02 +0000

yes, that’s exactly what i meant! just back up stuff from most important to least. im a photographer, i have over 100 gigs of photos, i have two copies of everything. mp3s are second most important, i have a lot of stuff that would be very hard to find again, or stuff that i ripped from vinyl myself. so that gets a second copy. everything else, i don’t care. movies, software, all that stuff can easily be found again.

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:07:51 +0000

If that’s the only data you need to protect then you are lucky and I agree, having two copies of 500gb probably isn’t “that big of a deal.”

Let me throw some other numbers at you: add somewhere around 50 DVDs worth of software (~225 gig), two terabytes of movies, and a veritable shit load of other “stuff” (from music videos to home movies to e-books to …) that brings the total closer to 3TB, maybe more.

My data falls into three categories: things that can be easily re-obtained (movies), things that would be difficult to re-acquire (mp3 conversions of old cassette tapes from local bands that broke up ten years ago) and things that would be impossible to replace (things I have created, digital photos, etc). Obviously not all of those things need the same type of redundancy; irreplaceable digital photos are more important to me than divx rips of movies that I’ll never watch.

I can’t tell you how many people have called me (in tears) because their computer imploded for whatever reason and they lost “everything”. I have over a thousand digital pictures of my daughter and probably a dozen physical prints. My digital data is EVERYTHING to me, which might be why I invest “more than the average bear*” into making sure it doesn’t die.

(* That’s a Yogi Bear joke. I am not a “Bear”.)

By: juba

juba — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:48:56 +0000

I have about 500 gigs of mp3s, i simply just have one copy of the collection at home, and another at work on an external drive. i dont see what the big deal is.