[Sussex] RAID & backup recomendations for home

Andy Smith andy at lug.org.uk
Fri May 12 11:00:34 UTC 2006


On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 11:11:37PM +0100, Diego Moore wrote:
> Let me get this right...
> 
> You rsync the files to a backup server, but if its just a backup
> server why use RAID? Am I missing something?

RAID isn't backups.

RAID keeps your machine up when a disk dies, saves you having to do a
bare metal restore.

Backups allow you to survive deletion or corruption of files,
retrieving historical content, or in emergency a bare metal restore.

Consider:

A RAID 1 of 100 disks (1 disk and 99 mirrors) is *really* redundant,
but when broken software corrupts your work, it's corrupted on all
100 disks.  And when you delete that important file, it's deleted on
all 100 disks.

Rebuilding a machine and restoring 100s of GB of data from tape
involves a lot of downtime and stress compared to just taking out
the dead driver and putting in a new one (and rebooting in between
depending on your setup).

-- 
http://strugglers.net/wiki/Xen_hosting -- A Xen VPS hosting hobby
Encrypted mail welcome - keyid 0x604DE5DB
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/attachments/20060512/78f24967/attachment.pgp 


More information about the Sussex mailing list