August 21, 2009 at 11:26 am
pgolds (8/21/2009)
I've been using Mozy for several years now and it's been great. It's configured to back up all my data and it backs up automatically when the computer is idle. Although I've never had to restore from there, it gives me great peace of mind knowing that my data is backed up and off site.
Backup is easy. it's restoring successfully that counts!
😀
Thinking whatever off-site solution I implement I need to test it!
August 21, 2009 at 11:39 am
We RAID! I have a pretty black server in my office at home that heats the entire house. There is a domain controller back there too. Back ups to an external drive are stored in a fire safe, I routinely back up my photos to DVD and bring them to work. I load a lot of pictures to Flickr so I wouldn't be all out if anything happened. Now I did not set up any of this and do not even pretend to know how to keep it running.
~Tamera Clark
Learning to be a SQL DBA one day at time.
August 21, 2009 at 12:45 pm
I use the D-Link DNS-321 NAS. It has 2 drive bays. I have 2 500GB drives at raid1. Easy to setup and use.
Jimmy
"I'm still learning the things i thought i knew!"August 21, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Interesting that this topic should happen to come up at the point when I'm just starting to look beyond what I do with my domain controller. I have a RAID 5 config on that machine and back it up to tape, but I never get around to doing anything with those tapes, so there's no protection from a house fire. I've been looking at WHS recently, as none of the home PC's have backup except for my main machine, and that's a very recent setup, with an Ultrium 2 tape drive. I've decided that the Symantec BackupExec on the domain controller cannot be effectively used to backup "Agent" PCs, as the agent software didn't run worth a darn and was partly responsible for crashing my Vista machine, such that I needed a re-build. I'm finally returning to employment (contract only for now), so I'm pretty sure I can put together a WHS machine before long.
I also wonder about whether I should replace my domain controller machine. It's getting old, and the SCSI drives might well be nearing end-of-life, so I'm considering building a new DC and then using DCPromo to have it replace the existing machine once I'm sure replication is complete. If I do that, then I could perhaps redeploy the old DC as the WHS machine, although a dual-processor mobo with Slot-1 Pentium II 400MHz cpus isn't exactly whiz-bang and might not perform all that well. Then there's the issue of what do I use for the new DC... Do I take my single-processor P4 @ 2.66 GHz and let that be the server? I'd really rather not, as then I'd be wanting to move SQL Server off of my Vista machine, but it would be highly impractical to use a machine with just 3GB of RAM for that setup. Besides, I may only have 32-bit Win2K3 Enterprise to work with (I think, anyway... does anyone know if the NFR copies have both 32-bit and 64-bit media?). Alternatively, maybe someone can offer me a super whiz-bang WHS machine in trade for the extra NFR copy I have of Win2K3 Server Enterprise (w/25 cal) ? That would make my decision process a heck of a lot easier, as that Win2K3 Enterprise w/25 cal is worth a good $700+ if you had to purchase it somewhere (based on NexTag search), and it actually was sold by MS at well over $2,000 at one point. Any takers?
Steve
(aka smunson)
:-):-):-)
Steve (aka sgmunson) 🙂 🙂 🙂
Rent Servers for Income (picks and shovels strategy)
August 21, 2009 at 1:31 pm
my data is the most important thing in the world!
Now that I have returned from my trip into the ego world... How much of our data is truly critical to our continued existence. In the world of digital photos we have the ability to backup our pictures far better than just having negatives in a fireproof safe which would hopefully prevent them from melting.
I would argue that you need to backup your tax data, your photos, your family videos and maybe a few other memory keepsakes. Keep in mind that any backup of digital is far superior than the lack of backup that ever occurred with physical items.
My wife still being unsure of her switch from film to digital is going to be darned sure she doesn't lose ANYTHING! To that end, she does not wipe a card until she has the pictures on her laptop, burned to 2, yes 2 dvds, and copied to our NAS. She will clean up the storage card even if we have not had a chance to get one of the dvds sent to her parents house. She originally wanted to use a safety deposit box at the bank. It is quite the backup plan considering that her negatives are all in a plastic box on a closet shelf.
One issue that i have seen with backups that are done frequently is that you start to wonder if something was backed up or not. Another issue with her pictures is that after you take x amount of pictures or format the card the numbering starts over again. This can punch a major hole in any backup scheme if it is simply copying to another location.
So much to think about and figure out...
Sometimes the best thing that can happen to a person is to have their drive fail. They quickly realize that they really are only missing one or two items, yet they couldn't part with any of it.
August 21, 2009 at 1:31 pm
5+ years ago I setup RAID on my home office Win 2003 server. I thought RAID would be a good safeguard - basically I thought it would be quick recovery in most cases, and thus sufficient when supplemented by occasional backups to other disk drives and external hard drives.
Turns out I was wrong. RAID crashes can be more difficult to recover from than a simple disk crash. Typically you can use a data recovery tool to extract data from a failing single disk drive. It can become more complicated to recover data when RAID is involved.
I now think RAID is not at all appropriate on a home, home office, small biz machine. It's just more complicated and expensive and confusing. Simpler is an online or Home Server like backup. You definitely need the automatic daily backup, cause once you don't backup for a month (or 6) and lose a months worth or data/work, the cost to recover instantly becomes $100's/$1000's when you count your lost time.
I recently signed up for Carbonite, which is like Mozy(Home). Seems to work well, though it takes a long time for the initial backup of only 15GB or so. Remote Access is a nice feature. At $35/yr, the price is right.
HomeServer might be a better option though. I'm just looking at it now after your article. Online/offsite seems like a nice no-worry, no power, no hardware option. But I imagine Home Server is faster and simpler, though not offsite, and it covers all computers, not just one. Carbonite is basically $35 to $50 per year for each computer.
So boo to RAID. Yes to Carbonite and probably yes to Home Server, though I'd need more of a pro/con list to choose between the Carbonite/MozyHome online option and the Home Server in your house option ...
August 21, 2009 at 2:06 pm
jeff (8/21/2009)
5+ years ago I setup RAID on my home office Win 2003 server. I thought RAID would be a good safeguard - basically I thought it would be quick recovery in most cases, and thus sufficient when supplemented by occasional backups to other disk drives and external hard drives.Turns out I was wrong. RAID crashes can be more difficult to recover from than a simple disk crash. Typically you can use a data recovery tool to extract data from a failing single disk drive. It can become more complicated to recover data when RAID is involved.
I now think RAID is not at all appropriate on a home, home office, small biz machine. It's just more complicated and expensive and confusing. Simpler is an online or Home Server like backup. You definitely need the automatic daily backup, cause once you don't backup for a month (or 6) and lose a months worth or data/work, the cost to recover instantly becomes $100's/$1000's when you count your lost time.
I recently signed up for Carbonite, which is like Mozy(Home). Seems to work well, though it takes a long time for the initial backup of only 15GB or so. Remote Access is a nice feature. At $35/yr, the price is right.
HomeServer might be a better option though. I'm just looking at it now after your article. Online/offsite seems like a nice no-worry, no power, no hardware option. But I imagine Home Server is faster and simpler, though not offsite, and it covers all computers, not just one. Carbonite is basically $35 to $50 per year for each computer.
So boo to RAID. Yes to Carbonite and probably yes to Home Server, though I'd need more of a pro/con list to choose between the Carbonite/MozyHome online option and the Home Server in your house option ...
I think it depends on what RAID level. If you are using RAID 1 i do not see the difficulty. If using RAID 5 then yes getting data off of one drive is impossible (well nearly i guess) because striped disks with parity. But then again, if you only have one drive fail then you shouldn't have to do anything extraordinary to recover. Replace the drive and run the raid utilities and you should be done.
Jimmy
"I'm still learning the things i thought i knew!"August 21, 2009 at 3:14 pm
I have a multi-prong approach. I run 2 machines with Windows Server 2008 (upgrading to R2 in the next week or so) with DFS configured for my important data. In addition I have a NAS with 4 500GB Drives in Raid 5 on which I back the DFS.
Overkill, maybe but I do not want to lose any data .
August 23, 2009 at 9:53 am
Interesting approaches. I still think that having a non-RAID, drivespace like protection makes good sense for home, especially as it can be hard to find drives of the same size/speed. If you had 2-3 drives in there and upgraded one every year to a larger (double) size, you'd always have more space.
The offsite thing is more of a hassle, and I can see the need here. I'm not sure what I'd want to do as it's hard to know if some of these companies will continue to exist (outside of MS/Google/Yahoo) and what happens if they die.
I have a number of photos at Google, but honestly I've thought about doubling them up at Flickr to give me a backup of my backup 😉
August 24, 2009 at 12:34 am
I have been thinking about this myself and come to the conclusion that ZFS is the new hot thing on the market, software raid with error correcting code. It does not exist for windows thou and I dont want to use hardware raid. Thus I'll have to build myself a little server. Thinking about doing OpenSolaris + ZFS (raidz2) +Samba and I should be good to go.
August 24, 2009 at 2:48 am
YES - TO RAID.
I have MS Home Media Server. I use a RAIDed (1 - mirrored) external HDD. This is to make it easy to ensure that I can just keep stuff running by replacing a faulty drive. I keep replaceable items (e.g. ripped CDs and soon DVDs - yes bought ones!!!) on this but am currently looking to create separate (geographically speaking) backups for photos and home videos. Currently these items are only backed up on the original PCs. Fortunately, my office (where Home Media Server exists) is in a separate building from the PCs so unless someone lands a plane on my property I guess that is ok.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
August 24, 2009 at 4:51 am
Steve Jones - Editor (8/23/2009)
Interesting approaches. I still think that having a non-RAID, drivespace like protection makes good sense for home, especially as it can be hard to find drives of the same size/speed. If you had 2-3 drives in there and upgraded one every year to a larger (double) size, you'd always have more space.The offsite thing is more of a hassle, and I can see the need here. I'm not sure what I'd want to do as it's hard to know if some of these companies will continue to exist (outside of MS/Google/Yahoo) and what happens if they die.
I have a number of photos at Google, but honestly I've thought about doubling them up at Flickr to give me a backup of my backup 😉
Steve,
Never thought about that! what if they go belly up? Interesting....
I installed windows home server (3x) this weekend. Not sure what happened but it took 3x to get it to work.
Planning on doing something off-site too. Leaning towards Mozy, they are actually advertising on TV, figure if they have the $$$ for that they are probably solvent for a while.
Mark
August 24, 2009 at 8:30 am
Let's hope most of these companies survive, but they ought to have an escrow clause if they hold backups. Return the data if they die.
I'm tempted to get a safe deposit box and go drop a DVD in there every few months.
August 24, 2009 at 8:35 am
jeff (8/21/2009)
...I thought RAID would be a good safeguard - basically I thought it would be quick recovery in most cases, and thus sufficient when supplemented by occasional backups to other disk drives and external hard drives.Turns out I was wrong.
Just out of curiosity, what level of RAID were you using? Mirroring, I would have thought, would be incredibly easy, albeit a bit slower than not. But, as I said before, fire-proof is not the same as heat-proof; RAID 5 recovery is theoretically a dead technology; and anything but RAID 0 or 1 has a long recovery time.
August 24, 2009 at 8:43 am
I was using RAID1. I would have thought easy recovery also. Not always as easy as you hope/expect.
RAID1 (mirror) on external HD is a totallly different issue. Yeah, if that external HD goes bad, it's easy to pop in drives. Not necessarily so easy when your active system, non hot swappable, Windows 2003 server RAIDed drive goes bad.
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