to use RAID or not to use RAID

[MatthewTimothy]

I have seen many of you post that RAID (alone) is not a sufficient backup, which is true.

BUT, a backup can be RAID (and often is).

i believe some are also referring to not just one location. There are other quality and affordable solutions. One device is just not enough and in the case of a disaster it still can be damaged and services no purpose then. Amazon has an affordable cloud up to 5000TBs if i recall and Godaddy has up to 100gb clouds. However, the downfall with a cloud is you will always be relying on someone else's uptime regardless. On some clients info I will burn to blue-ray. Also with external HDDs they can make for great storage devices but over time they can fall apart. Tape drives are usually considered the best solution to backup but come at a price tag.

 

[adrock]

I've got my caviar blacks set up RAID 0, and my SATA2 SSDs RAID 0 as well. Big performance boost.

 

[particleman]

Wow, this is going to take a bit to read over. Thanks for all your input.

I more or less want to have a server (Windows SBS Essentials) I want people to be able to access files from it (file sharing), and people use programs such as quickbooks in it remotely.

It looks like, using a trial of the program I can tell it to back up certian things to certain places. Example (company folder to external hard drive).

I did read that quickbooks doesn't work so hot with RAID.

Is it fine just to tell the OS to back things up or better to have everything completely mirrored?

In your situation I would say Raid 1 as minimum. This is sort of the rule of thumb for any machine you consider a server and require fault tolerance. And No, Raid (1 at least) is not considered a "backup" in that it is intended to protect data on disk in the event of a disk failure while keeping the host system running. Normally a disk can be swapped out (hot swapped) while the system is running and the machine never goes down.

Quickbooks works fine with raid, I can speak from experience. Real raid (not software raid) is transparent to the operating system. I highly suggest you invest in a quality name brand raid card also.

If you all you want is a file server you might want to consider a name brand NAS. The size and overhead of management is decreased and they work really well. We have a 5 bay synology with 7TB of storage. The unit has dual gigabit ports. It would handle all of your file sharing needs with ease. The management interface is simply awesome too! The only issue you would run into with that is hosting a quickbooks company file probably wouldn't work, you need a windows host that can run the database management piece.

 

[choucove]

While it's not the most ideal technically, we have our Quickbooks company file located directly in a shared folder directly on the file server. This means you don't have to have Quickbooks actually installed on the host server, just the company files located in a shared directory and a mapped network drive on the accounting computer to that shared folder.

 

[ironchef]

Ill google it later, but anyone have a simple explanation of what raid is? Is it like a nas? Or a server

 

[MikePro]

Ill google it later, but anyone have a simple explanation of what raid is? Is it like a nas? Or a server

RAID (redundant array of independent disks) is a storage technology that combines multiple disk drive components into a logical unit. Data is distributed across the drives in one of several ways called "RAID levels", depending on what level of redundancy and performance is required.


NAS operates as a file-server to multiple clients via networked appliances which contain one or more hard drives, often arranged into logical, redundant storage containers or RAID arrays. While the existence of files on a machine does not classify it as a server, the mechanism which shares these files to clients by the operating system is the server.


also noted: i currently run NAS with a RAID1 array. I also manually backup to another external hard drive, bi-weekly, and keep it in a fireproof safe at home.

 

[signswi]

I have seen many of you post that RAID (alone) is not a sufficient backup, which is true.

BUT, a backup can be RAID (and often is).

RAID, the technology, is not a backup technology, it's a HD redundancy technology. That's the point. Matthew nailed it in that adding RAID doesn't mean you have backup, just redundancy. You need offsite and an automatic policy in place for anything resembling true backup.

 

[GB2]

I'm using two 4TB NAS Buffalo Terra Stations with a Raid 5 system. One acts as a server for data storage on the network and the second one is just to back up the first one. Every once in a while I will also create another backup on another external hard drive and store that in a different location.

 

[signswi]

I believe Buffalo's software supports automatic backup to Amazon S3, worth looking into. Having 2 NAS with RAID 5 with one as a backup of the other, both in the same building, is a touch silly .

 

[GB2]

Silly? When someone knocks the first one off the shelf and it's in pieces on the floor, I just go to the back up and I'm in business...what's silly about that? The reality about backups is that they are needed primarily due to viruses or equipment failure issues and not fire, theft or other catastrophic issues, however...I do maintain the second backup offsite as I stated, to protect against those more remote possibilities.

 

[Dave Rowland]

quality of RAID hardware is something that should not be ignored, now using 3ware with good results.
I have used RAID 0 installs on boot drives, although I been lucky I do know one little glitch will require a re-install of the PC.

 

[signswi]

Silly? When someone knocks the first one off the shelf and it's in pieces on the floor, I just go to the back up and I'm in business...what's silly about that? The reality about backups is that they are needed primarily due to viruses or equipment failure issues and not fire, theft or other catastrophic issues, however...I do maintain the second backup offsite as I stated, to protect against those more remote possibilities.

Lock your equipment closet! Employees shouldn't be able to get anywhere near it. I understand what you're saying though. Maybe internet is slow where you are and pulling images down is a slow proposition? I'm lucky enough to be right near a backbone so I can pull down as fast as I can reimage. In any case props for being thorough.

 

[choucove]

Slow internet options is the biggest reason why our office has not considered cloud-based backup solutions. At both of our locations we have 500GB + of stored artwork, customer files, etc. to backup which on a 3 to 6 Mb/s download and 1 Mb/s upload DSL line would be nearly impossible to complete in a timely matter.

 

[signswi]

Actually wouldn't be terrible at that speed, a full backup from a complete loss would take a bit but in that case your shop is probably closed during your rebuild or whatever ;P.

Initial upload takes a while but you keep working during it and then once you max out changes are uploaded using segmentation and only the changes to a file are modified, which cuts your bandwidth use down by a ton. You won't even notice it in the background, keeping you safe...

That said, DSL is awful and it's 2012. If it's your only option...yikes, another reason to avoid Kansas .

 

[ironchef]

Right! I just got comcast business class in my area, still on att contract... dsl sucks! Its so slow, i cant upload sh'''t...looking for a network and storage solution, ive learned alot from this post, thanks yall... i think ill go with a small buffalo with 2 or 4 tb with raid1 , i have 2 external 1tb drives i will do back ups on. Anyone habe the buffalo tech. Nas? And connect all that with a gigabit switch. Also looking at the amazon cloud storage.

 

[Tovis]

I created a backup using the servers software. It looks like it does it as an image. If that backup is set to another computer and the server goes down (fire or whatever) is it easy to recover that backup or are all the files encrypted or something.

 

[smdgrfx]

I'm using windows home server 2011 in a shuttle case. The microsoft software does a software RAID (if you choose), remote access server, image backups of each computer on the network, and data backups to an external hard drive for redundancy(i don't use the software RAID, just the backup). Also has Quickbooks data shared off it. It is a simple solution that did not cost very much. As many have said, make sure if you do a RAID, that you use a piece of hardware that can be replaced. I had a RAID 0 on a workstation that went down and I had to jump through some hoops to find a used motherboard with the same chipset. I am now using LSI RAID controllers on my workstations.