Back It Up Part 1

Glad to hear you are OK. Keep us posted.

Thanks for those references. I'll be looking at those as soon as I am a bit more awake.

How good are those water cooled safe boxes in protecting drives from a house fire (God forbid that happens to anybody)

Around here the big danger is from Tornadoes. A water cooled safe isn't going to be much of a protection if you can't find the safe. Some folks whose homes have been destroyed by a Tornado have recovered items that were carried a mile or more from their home.

On line storage makes sense but like Ivan warns, you open yourself up to identity theft when storing sensitive data.

IvanLasston said:

I've mentioned this before - but another thing you could do is run a raid server - and swap disks periodically. You could put the disks in a safe deposit box or somewhere else off site.

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RAID is not, and should not be, considered anything like a backup method at all. It's a fault tolerant (not proof) architecture, disks in RAID arrays can (and do) fail regularly and dataloss is not an unusual situation with a RAID array. There are array types that are more tolerant than others, but there are always trade offs. In general, RAID isn't really aimed at the consumer market. It has been adopted in recent years, but it's primarily a high availability type solution.

You should always have another backup method. I'm certainly not going to fail an array, and force a rebuild, on a regular basis simply to have a backup (although I am aware that people do).

Dysfunction said:

RAID is not, and should not be, considered anything like a backup method at all. It's a fault tolerant (not proof) architecture, disks in RAID arrays can (and do) fail regularly and dataloss is not an unusual situation with a RAID array. There are array types that are more tolerant than others, but there are always trade offs. In general, RAID isn't really aimed at the consumer market. It has been adopted in recent years, but it's primarily a high availability type solution.

You should always have another backup method. I'm certainly not going to fail an array, and force a rebuild, on a regular basis simply to have a backup (although I am aware that people do).

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Correct - but there are several raid levels - including mirroring. As I said in some other post - RAID by itself doesn't save you from catastrophic loss like a fire or tornado - you need to have some offsite strategy as well. Taking apart a raid array isn't for the feint of heart either - but it is a way to backup offsite using hard drives. That being said - you'll also need to take ESD protections as well as shock protections when moving hard drives. You also need to keep enough hard drives to rebuild - and that is also dependent on raid level. I never said it was a perfect backup solution - but show me something that is.

Also - if you are backing up - backing up to a single disk is quite a dangerous proposition. Single disk failure is an issue far more frequent than catastrophic loss - so RAID can be a solution for a backup system.

As I said - I need to consolidate and put down the ups and downs of RAID and where it does and doesn't work - but you are absolutely correct - RAID in and of itself is not a backup solution.

IvanLasston said:

but show me something that is.

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At the consumer level, absolutely nothing. You get into the enterprise level, and you get closer with synchronous continual data duplication to remote DR sites, even then there's risk.. just far more mitigated risk.

BTW, I'm more concerned about the risk of dataloss while failing that array, which will depend on array type. For instance, let's look at RAID 5, so we fail a drive. Ok, we have parity across the other drives in the array to rebuild. Awesome! Well, sure but now we're taxing the array members pretty hard, since we're reading parity across all of them. Now, well.. we take say, a read error or spindle failure on one, and poof. The array's gone. No longer rebuildable. Sure, 1's more tolerant of this.. but man... still. It'd be easier just to take an additional drive, mount it and dd the array to it, at least IMHO.

Just to augment IvanLasston's previous post, here are the operating systems supported by those cloud storage services through a native client:

Dropbox: Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS, Android and BlackBerry OS.
Box.net: Windows, OS X, iOS, Android and BlackBerry OS (including a PlayBook version).
SugarSync: Windows, OS X, iOS, Android, BlackBerry OS, Windows Phone (screenshots show WP pre 7) and Symbian.
Amazon CloudDrive: Windows, OS X and Android (only music can be streamed).
Microsoft SkyDrive: Windows, OS X, WP7 and iOS.
Google Drive: Windows, OS X, Chrome OS, iOS and Android.

Thanks Scruffy

Hey Mike, you hit my dilemma dead on. The problem with RAID is the fail/rebuild cycle - at least of the way I was thinking of doing it initially. And as I said - the transport and protection of the drives is still an issue. I mean there is tape - which is a little more robust but having a tape backup is pretty hairy even for a professional IT staff. I've seen plenty of Unrecoverable Read Errors (URE) on both raid and tape solutions to concern me. My thought was one of the mirror raid solutions and rotating in disks - into the mirror - instead of just a parity rebuild (which does stress everything). I don't know all the acronym terminology - is that what you meant by dd?

Right now - a simpler home solution is just to have multiple drives you back up to - which is what I've been suggesting for the time being until I get a raid solution sorted out. Well - I also have some users backing up to a RAID 1 La Cie disk connected to an Airport Extreme just to help mitigate single disk failure.

IvanLasston said:

Hey Mike, you hit my dilemma dead on. The problem with RAID is the fail/rebuild cycle - at least of the way I was thinking of doing it initially. And as I said - the transport and protection of the drives is still an issue. I mean there is tape - which is a little more robust but having a tape backup is pretty hairy even for a professional IT staff. I've seen plenty of Unrecoverable Read Errors (URE) on both raid and tape solutions to concern me. My thought was one of the mirror raid solutions and rotating in disks - into the mirror - instead of just a parity rebuild (which does stress everything). I don't know all the acronym terminology - is that what you meant by dd?

Right now - a simpler home solution is just to have multiple drives you back up to - which is what I've been suggesting for the time being until I get a raid solution sorted out. Well - I also have some users backing up to a RAID 1 La Cie disk connected to an Airport Extreme just to help mitigate single disk failure.

Click to expand...

dd is a unix command. Sorry It does a block by block (or byte by byte) copy of a disk, to another disk.. or can. It's a WHOLE lot more usable than that, but that'd be a good way to do a low-level copy, with low stress.

online backups for iphoto

I've learned some great tips on backups from this article and forum. My confusion is with online backups especially with iPhoto. I've read for days about online services. Do I need to select a service that supports Time Machine? Would the photos be placed back into the same organization? As a newer Mac user, it seems a bit different than backing up jpegs from a PC.

I'm glad you enjoyed the article. Part 2 should be up in a few days.

I have not had much experience with online backup services so please take the following with a huge grain of salt. I don't think the service necessarily must be Time Machine. In the case of iPhoto it would need to keep the library file structure intact.

Slydude-Thanks for your quick response. I'm going to try out a Western Digital firewire HD's instead of online backups.