Why even bother!!

[Idea Design]

...redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy...

Most people think that one backup source is enough, if they even bother at all.

Redundancy is the most important word in data backup, hands down.

I always ask people how big of a deal it would be if their workstation caught on fire. To me, it's annoying and time consuming to get another unit on-line, but data loss is the very last thing that comes to mind in a total system failure.

My wife used to work at a place that was a heavy call-center for office supplies. Constant jibber-jabber, work-stations HAD to function, or else the orders would get twisted off. If they had any kind of crash or glitch or whatever, they called the IT dept, and out they'd come carrying another workstation to replace the one that's gone down. From down to up and running was something like 38 secs, with a completely different computer.

 

[SignBurst PCs]

As with everything, you get what you pay for. Western Digital has MANY different models of drives, all with different warranties, life expectancies, and failure rates. It is not always the brand, but more importantly, the model. External USB drives can be GREAT if you use them correctly. Never unplug them from your PC without using the "safely remove hardware" wizard/tool. Also, I would NEVER use one of these as a primary storage device. USE THEM TO BACKUP ONTO. You can store your files on your PC, and back them up to your external hard drive, or even better, rotate a couple external hard drives into your backup routine. They are relatively inexpensive (per/GB) and can save your butt.

 

[hoppers]

I have WD externals and sure they can be picky at times connecting, but they usually are pretty reliable IF you treat them right (safely disconnect them etc).

I currently backup to two 500'gbs external mirrored and usually pull one and put it in a fire safe if I am not going to be using it for awhile.

 

[tamiya]

I'm not a huge fan of using external HDDs continuously, especially the new slimline type without case fans.

These 7200rpm drives get pretty hot (often too hot to hold in your hand) and wrapping them in a tight fitting case is just asking for trouble.

My external drives are either ventilated with fans, total aluminium case heatsinked to the drive or just run the drive naked with a desk fan blowing on it. Only powered up when backing up etc, usually to 2 or 3 different ones in sequence.

As for brands... Maxtor has been a shocker (100% failure rate so far), WD works ok for but seems noisier... preference is for Seagate Barracuda ... as 'Conner' is no more.

 

[John M]

USB backup drives are fine for the average user wanting to transport files from A to B. For real backup work you should look at a network attached storage device that offers either RAID 1 (mirrored) or RAID 5 (parity). That works great as a daily backup device and means quick & easy access if you need something restored.

You should also write to DVD or other removable media on a regular (weekly or monthly) basis. This gives you a backup you can take offsite without worrying about a fragile hard drive.

Offsite network backups can be next to impossible when you look at the size of the files this industry works with. It's a great solution for Word documents and email but you could spend literally weeks maxing out your outgoing connection to write your existing data to a remote network. Even incremental backups after that would probably be too large to be feasible given the typical ~ 40k/sec upload speed of most cable & DSL packages.

 

[iSign]

decided to move my backup/hardware questions to their own thread:

http://www.signs101.com/forums/showthread.php?p=304914#post304914

 

[choucove]

Speaking of RAID 1/5/etc. I was somewhat curious of the difference between using a RAID 5 or a RAID 10 hard drive configuration for redundancy. I was told that with both these you can recover a dead hard drive by inserting a new one and the system with rebuild the information in a way. Is this correct?

 

[tamiya]

yes RAID5 will stripe your data across all the discs so that if any HDD fails, it can restore that HDD's data from all the rest

(but if a 2nd HDD fails during that restoring period... you're outta luck)

 

[Rhino]

We used to set up RAID 5 with a min 4 disks. 3 for parity and one hot spare. That way, there is no down time. If a drive blows, the hot spare would pick up. And, like tamiya said, replace the blown drive right away.

 

[choucove]

I guess I just must be confused on this. I was originally told that RAID 10 is basically what you have explained here as RAID 5. Four hard drives required, two are striped and the other two a mirror of that striping. Instead, using RAID 5 what would be the disk space usage/availability? For instance, having four 500GB hard drives, would using RAID 5 only allow you 500GB total space for saving (the rest for redundancy) or allow you a full 1 TB?

 

[Rhino]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

There's quite a bit to RAID. This might help a little..