Backup, RAID and 72 hours of pain

keirik

keirik

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There have been several threads on here about RAID and if its appropriate to use as backup

Now I'm not passing opinions, but thought I'd share my weekend with everyone

I have been using a Drobo as my storage/backup for the last year and at last count had around 900gb of wedding photos on it. All nice and happy as it works as it's striped and if any disc fails you theoretically don't lose your data (unless you happen to lose two discs simultaneously)

apart from, we had a power cut at the weekend - no probolem thinks me as Drobo has a backup battery to ensure it shuts down gracefully, and when the power came back I went and checked - its fine everything still there....

except my weddings folder is empty - yep 900GB gone!

According to Drobo dashboard the capacity was still utilised but there wasn't any data, boy did I get worried (although I never have a single copy of my work until after the client has got their copy so at least I still had the data for the clients still waiting)

so after conferring with Drobo themselves I ran chkdsk /r, it ran for 60 hours!

After that I had all my work back but it goes to show that you do need backups of backups.

As an additional tale, I decided to buy a new hard drive purely as backup and so bought a 1.5TB sata disc, plugged it in and that then crashed my desktop !
 
Problem is that most users have a single backup solution when in reality we need more than one - we view failure of our backup as 'unlikely' so don't farm out the risks, it's only when the 'unlikely' happens that we realise how wrong we were! :)
 
keep hearing horror stories about drobos...everyone seems to love them until they go unexpectedly wrong :/

And yes - you need offsite backup. Don't forget it. Take your 1.5tb sata disk offsite and regularly bring it back and sync it with the upated files on your drobo.
 
itsdavedotnet said:
keep hearing horror stories about drobos...everyone seems to love them until they go unexpectedly wrong :/
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problem is my previous backup was a 1tb disc that decided to give up the ghost too so nothing is perfect

it appears from researching on the web that power cycles definitely screw the drobo up other than that it works fine

And yes - you need offsite backup. Don't forget it. Take your 1.5tb sata disk offsite and regularly bring it back and sync it with the upated files on your drobo.
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Its going to my second shooters but it will be replaced regularly as it will fill up quick, so I bought a sata usb docking station so I can have a series of them and not have to open anything up
 
gramps said:
Problem is that most users have a single backup solution when in reality we need more than one - we view failure of our backup as 'unlikely' so don't farm out the risks, it's only when the 'unlikely' happens that we realise how wrong we were! :)
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yes agreed, but my previous was a hard disc that also failed and the drobo went t*ts up before I'd had chance to replace it

there ought to be a reliable medium but they're all crap - blue ray might be better bu I can't afford to use them given how quickly I'd fill them up - I'd need 20 just for my current archive
 
but in all seriousness, (and i'll keep banging on about it..) data you wish to keep should always be stored on at least 2 separate physical (raid counts as 1 physical) devices/media at all times (preferably with an offsite copy factored in)
 
This is why big drives are bad. All your eggs in one, rather unstable basket!
 
neil_g said:
but in all seriousness, (and i'll keep banging on about it..) data you wish to keep should always be stored on at least 2 separate physical (raid counts as 1 physical) devices/media at all times (preferably with an offsite copy factored in)
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agreed, and if your hard drive fails and then you have a problem with your raid before you can fix that you can still end up where i was despite having two forms of backup!

maybe you need three lots of backup?
 
keirik said:
agreed, and if your hard drive fails and then you have a problem with your raid before you can fix that you can still end up where i was despite having two forms of backup!

maybe you need three lots of backup?
Click to expand...

more the merrier :)

at the moment im running:

RAID5 main storage
USB off site storage
blu-ray off site storage
 
keirik said:
agreed, and if your hard drive fails and then you have a problem with your raid before you can fix that you can still end up where i was despite having two forms of backup!

maybe you need three lots of backup?
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I have three:)
 
well this morning I noticed my new backup of my RAID had failed, so I have to start that all over again

and I'd love to do bluray but it would cost me a fortune
 
keirik said:
well this morning I noticed my new backup of my RAID had failed, so I have to start that all over again

and I'd love to do bluray but it would cost me a fortune
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£80 odd for the drive and £22 for 20 spindle 25gb BD-R.. initial cost might be high but that works out to £0.044/gb long term. compared to a 2tb drive @ £79 at £0.0395/gb... so not much in it..

prices on the media should drop over time too, but then so should the cost of drives.
 
keirik said:
I have been using a Drobo as my storage/backup for the last year
Click to expand...

I think you've worked this out for yourself, but...

A single RAID as storage and backup :thumbsdown:

A single RAID for storage or backup :thumbs:

[that's an exclusive OR - XOR ;)]

The most common reason I have to restore data from my LTO tape library in the office is because users have accidentally deleted a file or folder that they wanted to keep.

The fact that our file servers are running on RAID arrays makes not one jot of difference to that. It helps guard against a disk failure, but not much else.
 
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neil_g said:
£80 odd for the drive and £22 for 20 spindle 25gb BD-R.. initial cost might be high but that works out to £0.044/gb long term. compared to a 2tb drive @ £79 at £0.0395/gb... so not much in it..

prices on the media should drop over time too, but then so should the cost of drives.
Click to expand...

its the initial cost and the time taken

now have the 1.5 TB disc in the docking station fully backing everything up that's on the Drobo

and with a 2TB disc probably holding 2 seasons photos that should be ok until I upgrade my second shooters from the 1d mk2
 
keirik said:
now have the 1.5 TB disc in the docking station fully backing everything up that's on the Drobo
Click to expand...

And is this backup running every day?

This would cover you in the event of a hardware failure,

but,

I hope you have considered the case where somehow a portion of photographs are deleted (by accident, disk corruption), and that this might go un-noticed for a week? If your backup is a 1:1 copy, then it will also record these deletions.

I think that the Blueray option is the most 'secure' backup from this type of error, but the most painful to recover from.
 
As said by pretty much everyone multiple copies on multiple devices in multiple locations is the key.

My photos are on my macbook, copied to my readynas duo (raid) and I've just got an external drive to copy them to and bring backward and forward to work... not the best offsite backup but as long as I remember to bring it home for regular backups then thats cool.... and all of this for photos that arent particularly important!!!

I've been very lucky with regards to drive failures... in the last 15 years I've had 2. The first I lost my entire MP3 collection but had the original CD's so was just a PITA to rip them all again. The 2nd was a drive connected to an NSLU2... that was configured for RAID and I almost lost the lot. Took me about a week to recover 90% of it.
 
You are better off mirroring than striping. Striping is much more easily corrupted. Some sophisticated data recovery tools might be able to get it back. If the master record with all the stripe information becomes corrupt then you lose the whole lot. I know several people who speak from bitter experience, including sys admins, who have all gone back to mirroring as they got bitten by stripes!
 
File corruption is the hardest thing to protect against. Keeping a copy of the RAWs that you don't touch at all is probably the best way. Even DVD archives are no good as the data can become unreadable after a few years with a lot of them, even with decent brands.
 
I have the drobo too, and tbh, if the Drobo fails, it doesn't affect me as it is a BACK UP, I have another copy else where.

Treat the Drobo as a single unit, not 2.
 
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