How do you protect your files from hard drive failures?
How do you protect your files when your hard drive fails? One of our clients came face-to-face with this question when his drive started to fail this week...and then his backup copy failed!
We want to know how you protect your files. Vote in the poll and leave comments we can delve deeper into this important issue.
We want to know how you protect your files. Vote in the poll and leave comments we can delve deeper into this important issue.
posted by Rich Seiling at
3/24/2009
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6 Comments:
I'm a bit paranoid, but I did have a complete drive failure and lost all my digital photos back in 2004. Now I've setup a wireless link to my parents house (about a block away) and run a backup server with Raid 1 (previously raid5). This way, I can easily backup my photos to the server using rsync from my home machine (I leave a copy on the home machine also). The server automatically does hourly and weekly snapshots in case I accidentally delete or corrupt some images before running rsync.
I had two backup drives of different manufacture, different enclosure and different data connection begin failing at the same time. Fortunately I was able to restore the data after a 24 hour marathon. I now run Raid 1 in an eSata enclosure, back up another with a single large drive and another backup to off-site drives for backup.
I backup to multiple hard drives, keep one offsite.
Double backup plus DVDs does the trick
Well while the primary day to day file server is presently RAID 5,
There are also separate syncronized removable HD backups of the file server. In addition to DVD copies done at specific points too ...
But since I'm still into film the old shoebox is the ultimate store.
I don't know why you even have Raid0 on this poll as a "backup" because we know that raid0 is for speed not for redundancy. (then again maybe it's a "trick" as I see you progressively blogged on this topic)
One "flaw" or negative in Raid1 is if your processor, computer or Raid card dies you still can't access your doubly backed up files. Most motherboards DO support Raid thru the MB, so it's not always the card, but unless you have a backup machine, or a good computer shop there is not always a gaurantee that you have another machine running the same style Raid if the HARDWARE (other than HDD) fails.
Just a thought. Raid1 is not bad for sure, just that there can be other issues. If you have raid1, you still don't have offsite backup. If you have a 'software mirrored' backup you can at least take that offsite, then bring onsite, run a backup and take it back. (or have an alternating copy)
I have a friend who has an external Lacie Raid1 HDD. One drive died, the good news, you can just swap out a drive, and it auto builds itself. In theory YES, but Lacie's policy is you have to send it to them, so there ya go... there is downtime, or you have to run out and buy a new backup for your backup while it gets re-furbed. (fail)
More comments to come on some of the other posts. Thanks for finding me on twitter.
~AcmePhoto
http://twitographer.com
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