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SSC Eights!
 
Group: General Forum Members
Last Login: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 7:42 AM
Points: 834,
Visits: 848
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| I do have a home "server" with RAID mirroring, but it's not Windows server, it's running Ubuntu 8.04 and using Samba to create network shared resources that my Windows PCs can see. For backup purposes my wife and I both use USB flash drives to hold copies of documents and for portability.
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Grasshopper
Group: General Forum Members
Last Login: Friday, January 15, 2010 10:24 AM
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I would be hesitant to use RAID without a solid backup strategy as well. If you have a drive failure, you may have a hard time finding a single replacement drive. If you start carrying a spare drive on the shelf, then your costs just went up.
After my brother's house burned down (no one was home) and they were able to retrieve only some of their memories, it hit me that backing up my documents and storing them next to my PC was only protecting against hardware failure. Also, I was less than consistent in backing up my documents to an external USB drive.
A couple of years ago, I went with a $50/year online encrypted storage. I chose Carbonite although it's been a couple of years since I've researched the vendors. I've been very happy with the service and have had to do a full system restore and got all of my documents back.
They only back up (by default) your content. That means your digital photos, Word docs, spreadsheets, multimedia, etc. You can select other files for backup (programs, etc.) by selecting them within Explorer. What I like is the second a file changes, it is queued up for backup to the continuously running system with a file watcher component. There is no thinking about what I need to back up and when. It just works.
I still maintain a full backup to USB drive in the event that I need to perform a complete system restore. I would have that backup + the up-to-date Carbonite backup. When I had to do my disaster recovery (due to my own stupidity in converting a disk to Dynamic partition), I received a workable system between the two backup systems, although it had a few issues as would probably be expected.
I guess my two cents would be - If your home PC contents are valuable to you, protect them likewise. Now that all of our family photos and videos are on the PC, I want to protect them in the event of some calamity to my home that would affect an on-site backup.
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SSChampion
Group: General Forum Members
Last Login: Today @ 3:53 PM
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My home file server (domain controller, sharepoint server) is running Server 2003 and has 4 drives in a RAID 5 config. Served me very well earlier this year when one of those drives unexpectedly failed.
Bought a new drive, switched the faulty one out, let the array rebuild and all was well again. Didn't even have to fetch out the backups.
Gail Shaw
We walk in the dark places no others will enter
We stand on the bridge and none may pass
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Valued Member
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Last Login: 2 days ago @ 11:08 AM
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RAID 5 on an Adaptec AHA-2400A with 4 ATA drives, experienced the first issues 7 years after installation.
Slated replacement is an Areca 1231ML with 4 to 8 WD RE4 2TB SATA drives, running RAID 6.
You don't need to keep drives on the shelf, just replace with a larger drive of the same spindle speed.
Alternately, have an external set of connectors for your RAID card for RAID 5 external drive backup, put them in a caddy/mount, and have two sets, one of which stays offsite. Use those for spares if you have to, replacing the backup sets with mismatched components.
Also, as usual, it's not a bad idea to buy the drives 1 at a time from different sources at different times, to try and avoid all the drives coming from the same production run.
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SSC Veteran
Group: General Forum Members
Last Login: Thursday, January 21, 2010 6:02 AM
Points: 258,
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| I have a Buffalo Terastation Live (2TB) NAS server that I bought a couple of years ago (it was on sale for less than $800, quite a deal at the time). I store all of my photos, music, software installers, etc. on it. I back up the more important stuff early each morning to a drive attached via USB to the NAS server. I run the NAS server in RAID 5 mode, and that actually saved me recently when one of my drives went bad. I bought a same sized/speed replacement drive, shut down the server, popped out the bad drive, put in the new drive, started the server back up, and in a few hours it had rebuilt the new drive. I was fearful when I had to do this that it wouldn't work, but it did, and now I feel very comfortable using RAID 5.
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SSC Rookie
Group: General Forum Members
Last Login: Wednesday, February 24, 2010 10:04 AM
Points: 37,
Visits: 279
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I've been running a WHS server for several years now (did the beta then bought the product at RTM); it's on an older Dell desktop that I added 16 1TB drives to via 2 controllers each with 2 eSATA ports (using Addonics port multipliers to connect the drives).
The WHS backs up the various PC's in my house (4-8 depending), and acts as a file server, print server, and media server to a slew of devices. It's really excellent, and I have had very few issues with it at all - it just runs and does it's thing.
The strategy WHS uses to provide reliable storage is very interesting, sort of an app-level (folder/file-level) RAID-1 approach. NTFS reparse points are key to the strategy and it is both simple to manage and very effective. A key benefit versus RAID is that with all the drives managed as a large storage pool, the system can be fully immune to multiple drive failures (and if not fully immune, you will only lose a relatively small amount of data on successive drive failures).
Performance of WHS has been excellent as well; my system (with two gig-E network ports) can serve lots of clients at once, including sourcing multiple mpeg-4 video streams. The storage approach in WHS makes the most of slow disks/controllers, and uses idle time to do the leveling/replication.
But regardless how effective WHS is, it's no substitute for an off-premises backup solution! I've been doing the take-a-disk-to-work thing (Vantec EZ-Swap cartridges rock), but that's getting old so I'm looking for a net backup solution for WHS itself.
In short, it's been a great system for me....
The End.
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SSCrazy Eights
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Last Login: Today @ 2:45 PM
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I have an external drive that I back up to nightly.
I really should subscribe to one of the online services, but haven't yet.
- GSquared
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon
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SSChampion
Group: Administrators
Last Login: Today @ 3:16 PM
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RAID isn't a substitute for backup, and I didn't mean to imply that. I was curious how many people wanted to deal with that at home, monitoring failed drives, etc.
My plan is to use WHS with their drive technology as the backup machine, main stuff on other machines.
I do currently use Live Mesh since I have 3 machines that I move stuff around on. It's great if you have multiple machines, as long as you have small files. Not sure it would work great for your photo library, but I do have it running for articles, editorials, blogs, presentations, SQL Scripts.
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Forum Newbie
Group: General Forum Members
Last Login: Tuesday, March 09, 2010 2:39 AM
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Steve,
You mention having your data backed up to hard drives kept all over the house, what if your house gets destroyed by fire, flood, terrorists, the governement etc etc?
Where do you restore from then?
Phill
Phill Carter
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SSChampion
Group: Administrators
Last Login: Today @ 3:16 PM
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Have a good resume on the web
That's a great point, and I have no idea. Guess stuff is gone. However with the volume I have around here, none of the online backups I've looked at make a lot of sense.
I do have a lot of pictures online at places, so I'm semi-protected.
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