Drobo, good idea?

neil_g said:
not ideal in my opinion. raid isnt designed to work that way, it'll be horribly slow to rebuild and itll be running in a degraded mode when the 2nd disk is removed.
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So to achieve what I want, would it just be best to run individual drives in their own enclosures and just keep adding and swapping as necessary?
 
neil_g said:
not ideal in my opinion. raid isnt designed to work that way, it'll be horribly slow to rebuild and itll be running in a degraded mode when the 2nd disk is removed.
Click to expand...

Come on then ... this crops up so many times it must be time for one of you IT Pros to put together an idiots guide to the best way to achieve a backup solution.
 
scheduled network backups is the way forward. i agree with Neil, RAID is not designed to copy data for you.

i've got my NAS setup as this:
-RAID5 volume for all data, single volume for backup.
-scheduled weekly backup from RAID5 to single volume to account for RAID controller failure on important data.
-scheduled monthly cloud backup for the most important data.

this is why buying a NAS which is basically a mini-computer is much better than buying a storage enclosure like Drobo. the mini-computer can schedule and handle all your backup needs, if setup correctly.
(i recommend Synology as it's really easy to setup everything on it)
 
gramps said:
Come on then ... this crops up so many times it must be time for one of you IT Pros to put together an idiots guide to the best way to achieve a backup solution.
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I'm with wuyanxu. Scheduled network backups.

What I found was that it helped to separate your data into the following types

  • Critical: e.g. user files/photos etc. Back up frequently. Ideally as soon as the file hits your disk. Mine is every 20 minutes.
  • Non critical or critical but are large/change slowly: e.g. system images, backup weekly or when changes are made.
  • Recreatable: i.e. stuff you'll bear the pain of redoing if it died. Have some redundant protection for this (e.g. RAID5)
  • Temporary files: I never back these up

If you can split your data into these subsets and apply appropriate backup strategies for each, you're doing as good as you can without blind duplication.

What I do is:

  • Original data on user machines
  • Backup critical files every 20 minutes the changed files to a RAID 1 array on a central fileserver
  • Backup the backup overnight to a single user machine (yes, this means leaving machines on). This gives redundant backups.
  • Image system drives once a week to make system recovery easier. These are also backed up twice. This is my definition of large critical files that change slowly.
  • I run a RAIDZ system for my media. This is RAID5 like, but is more resilient to both drive failure and losing data. It is the reason I run FreBSD on my main server. I do this as I'm too cheap to have several TB of disk backing up media - that's what the originals are for!
  • I never back up c:/temp or /tmp...

I do all of this with rsync and ssh as they exist on all systems and whilst they take a bit of setting up, backups are single line commands.
 
Anytime I have had critical issues it's always been my Acronis Image that has got me back to a quick and easy return to 'where I was' computing.
 
treeman said:
If either if you two kind gents could rephrase that in an idiots guide, that would be much appreciated. At the moment it just reads as gobbledygook to me:-)
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enclosure and configuration doesn't matter, you just need to have a good back-up schedule and plan.


it's like photography really, camera is only a tool, your own creativity is the real picture maker.
 
I swear it would easier to get blood out of a stone than some useful info out of you tech guys!

I understand to keep two copies of everything, one on site and one off, the back up for my requirements will handled by time machine and frequency etc is all down to ones own working preferences, but I'm just trying to get to the bottom of is what physically is it you take on and off site?

An HD in its own powered enclosure? (seems like you're paying for stuff you don't need each time like the power supply etc)

An HD that runs in a multi HD box? This seems most economical as you just buy the drives, but from what everyone appears to be saying is the multi drive is pointless :shrug:

Either I'm being thick (granted, quite possible) or everyone is being very cryptic with their answers :thinking:
 
How many PC's do you have?
 
gramps said:
Come on then ... this crops up so many times it must be time for one of you IT Pros to put together an idiots guide to the best way to achieve a backup solution.
Click to expand...

thing is there isnt really one definitive answer. theres budget, scalability, redundancy and many more ive probably forgotten.

cheapest and simplest way - two or more usb/fw/esata drives with one rotated off site.

if you want a scalable solution in a single box then it has to be a raid/hybrid raid solution with at least 4 drive bays. but again you need a backup copy, preferably taken off site.

from there on the skys the limit depending on how much money you throw at it.

my solution - main storage is a synology DS1010+ NAS (5 bays with 2tb disks in raid5 giving 7.1tb) accessed cabled gigabit ethernet.

that is backed up to an icybox IB-RD4320StUS2 (2 bays with 2tb in raid0 (i know raid0 isn't ideal for disk redundancy but its only an on site 2nd copy for quick restores) giving 3.6tb) attached by USB2 to the synology. the synology runs a built in incremental backup every night.

i need to address the icybox at some point soon, i only have a couple hundred gb remaining. problem is its not scalable so i need to find something else, which means moving up to a 4 drive unit, which means £££.

my photos and LR cat is archived off to blu-ray (doesn't suffer with environmental degradation like dvd) when i add a new batch and those are taken off site (my work drawer). everything else goes on a variety of USB hard drives which also go off site.

so i think the way treeman wants to work it (i.e. direct attach) the drobo isnt a bad idea, its scalable but its not cheap. £450 for the unit (newer S version) with no drives. and thats without a backup.
 
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treeman said:
I'm just trying to get to the bottom of is what physically is it you take on and off site?
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Your data ;) Either disks in caddys if they are ejectable, portable drives if something like a USB/Firewire external drive or nothing if you just backup your data electronically to the cloud (surely Apple have some cloud storage backup option foryour critical data...).

The problem with an idiots guide is the answers depend on how much you have to store and how much bandwidth you have. For example, I need close to a terabyte of offsite backup. This is only viable with hard disks for the moment, although with a 20Mbit upload and cloud storage dropping in price it is becoming more viable. If you only have a couple of GBytes that you want offsite, the occasional copy to DVD and put in the desk at work is equally as viable for you.
 
Thanks Neil and Andy, that's helped a lot :thumbs:

I'm not sure Cloud is an option with the amount of space I need (currently 1 TB per year), but I'll look into it.
 
You can also throw Cloud storage into the mix! My set-up involves my OS (no data) on a SSD with a cloned copy on a seperate SSD on a single 2TB drive on a daily maternal back-up
 
Ignore last, hit send by mistake!

You can also throw Cloud storage into the mix! My set-up involves my OS (no data) on a SSD with a cloned copy on a seperate external SSD. My data is on a single 2TB drive in 4 partitions which is backed up incrementally on a daily basis to 2 x 1TB HDDs. These are then backed up weekly to an external box with 2 x 1TB HDDs. I'm happy I can restore but do need off-site storage and I'm running out of space - still thinking how best to achieve this!

For LR users, can you archive old jobs to say an external dedicated HDD and if so, how do you do it?

Thanks
 
Re Cloud storage, membership of the NPS is £99 a year but includes iirc 25GB of Cloud storage.
 
Wilko58 said:
My set-up involves...
Click to expand...
And this is where different strategies for different people come in :D

My setup involves... 7 PCs which have backups that are maintained (there are a further 3 I don't bother with!) so automation is a must and duplicating things onto individual machine backups would get costly.

I will admit to starting to buy redundant hardware - I have a spare quality PSU and a hot swappable 2TB disk spare in my array and I have recently bought a couple of UPS to protect the main computers from spikes etc...

Just think of me as the PC equivalent of the camera hoarder ;)
 
ah now theres another thing, UPS.. now that you have your nice storage system how does the thought of all of those read heads clattering onto the platters in a power cut sound :lol:
 
neil_g said:
ah now theres another thing, UPS.. now that you have your nice storage system how does the thought of all of those read heads clattering onto the platters in a power cut sound :lol:
Click to expand...

Lol indeed, I've got mine and my San all on ups :)
 
Out of interest, why have you got a SAN rather than a NAS?
 
arad85 said:
Out of interest, why have you got a SAN rather than a NAS?
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A few reasons primarily to reduce my system administration and expandability. Over the years I've been adding capacity to it, refreshing the existing, but maintaining a single point of administration, reduce on clutter/cables etc. But granted you could achieve similar functionality with some NAS devices.

The key use case is that a) I've got two specific uses where I want the drive to be seen as a local block storage device (i.e. local disk), in my experience it also provides better performance. b) secondly for my development activities I am also running an esx server and boot servers/clients directly from the SAN storage, so better consolidation of storage.

I appreciate it is not for everyone :thumbs:
 
treeman said:
I swear it would easier to get blood out of a stone than some useful info out of you tech guys!

I understand to keep two copies of everything, one on site and one off, the back up for my requirements will handled by time machine and frequency etc is all down to ones own working preferences, but I'm just trying to get to the bottom of is what physically is it you take on and off site?

An HD in its own powered enclosure? (seems like you're paying for stuff you don't need each time like the power supply etc)

An HD that runs in a multi HD box? This seems most economical as you just buy the drives, but from what everyone appears to be saying is the multi drive is pointless :shrug:

Either I'm being thick (granted, quite possible) or everyone is being very cryptic with their answers :thinking:
Click to expand...

I have two back ups, one FW800 drive permanently connected to my iMac, which gets backed up to continuously using time machine. Then a totally separate back up on a LaCie rugged drive, which is a bootable clone on my hard drive made using CCCloner, this disk is kept off site and only comes into the house for the time the back up takes.
 
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