Comments on: Home RAID vs backup?

By: Passing by

Passing by — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:53:25 +0000

“And due to the redundancy, RAID systems have failures much more often than a single disk does.” LOL This is a joke right? If you are using a RAID system for redundancy (RAID 0 or 10 for example), the whole point of having it is just in case a drive fails. While statistically a RAID will fail more often then a single disk, I guess it really boils down to priorities. A single disk is cheaper, yes, but if it fails you are down, it’s a single point of failure. A RAID costs more, but if one drive fails, the system can continue running until you replace the drive that went bad. Rebuilding the lost drive once replaced is a simple process, as the data is already on it’s sister drive(s). To put things in perspective, would you rather fly in a single engine passenger plane, or a multi-engine commercial jetliner? The single engine plane is cheaper, yes. But if that one engine fails, your future looks pretty bleak… Luckly, setting up RAID is a small price to pay for keeping your data safe, unlike buying a commercial jetliner.

By: Mikeloeven

Mikeloeven — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 12:17:41 +0000

Actually i have been using a hybrid hard soft raid solution atmy house and so far i havent had alot of issues with it dispide an ocasional dropped drive. but i completely agree about ugly raid failures and that is why i actually have a external drive that i back up my raid to once a month. additionally if i do encounter a dropped drive i always backup to the external before attempting a rebuild. kinda ironic tho needing a backup of your backup

By: Jacob Marley

Jacob Marley — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 01:59:06 +0000

@Stellablue

You do realize that the RAID built into most consumer motherboards and entry level RAID cards are all “software” based via the BIOS and/or driver?

Also, RAID3/4/5/6 (and others) all provide varying levels of redundancy and varying levels of performance…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

By: Stellablue

Stellablue — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 00:12:48 +0000

RAID is not a backup and is not intended to be one. RAID 1 (mirroring) is a data redundancy system. Like things in the Space Shuttle, you have two (2) of them, and if one (1) fails, you can keep going…Down the system when appropriate and swap out the drive, restart, migrate and back to business; whether that is computing or flying to International Space Station.

RAID is fairly cheap and built into most motherboards nowadays. Why would you not buy it? I guess if you have a single drive system and have a failure you are dead in the water until you replace drive and do a full OS restore from your backup.

Hard drives are very inexpensive and personally, I recommend RAID 1 to all of my clients. They all don’t buy it, but the ones that do not want to deal with DOWN time, do it in a heartbeat.

The other RAID setups are striping and performance based and do no yield data redundancy.

Online backup: totally useless, who wants their private data in the hands of some 3rd party.

Software RAID: totally useless ! don’t even do it, hardware RAID only way to go.

You can’t run RAID 1 (mirror) everywhere tho, so we do live in a World where a single drive failure can bring down your laptop, iPod, or DVR. However, Primary Home PCs should use RAID 1 in my opinion. For example, I had RAID 1 on my i7 quad-core windows machine as it is my primary PC. My laptop and 2nd tower (quad-boot with Linux, Win7, WinXP, Mac OSx) are single drive systems that are vunerable to single point drive failure. Personally, I ‘clone’ those drives occasionally.

Backup: All systems need a backup mechanism ! period. Unless do not value anything you create or create nothing, there are things to Backup. Backups should be incremental (not full) as bulk of data does not change daily. Backups should allow extraction of single file or files. So on Windows, use robocopy and Mac/Linux use rsync.

My backups run nightly on PCs that run 24hrs a day and on systems I shutdown (laptop), a quick-double click on icon and robocopy backups only what changed to a Network drive.

Some of the article and comments are kinda scary.

“And due to the redundancy, RAID systems have failures much more often than a single disk does.” – I think that is one of the dumbest statement I ever read. Do airplanes and the Space shuttle have more failures because of Redundancy? No, that has been proven. Redundancy in any system improves system up-time and allows things to keep moving in case of failure.

Hard drives last a long time (40,000+ MTBF or more). What would you rather do ‘roll-the-dice’ on a single drive that could have a premature failure and just die…..or Double your odds and have 2 drives !! ever go to Vegas??

If you are selling RAID as a backup method, you are totally missing the point. And if you do NOT know how to correctly replace a RAID drive in a system due to the “complexity”, I suggest you keep your hands away and call someone who can fixed it. RAID identifies drives by Port number, Model no. and Serial no. If you can’t change out the correct drive from that info….maybe try needle-point.

Also, Drives today have SMART (self-monitoring, analysis and report technology) in them which allows a drive to ‘predict’ it’s eventual demise. Basically, the drive has to operate within a set range of parameters and if it does not, a SMART error warning occurs. This is your signal to replace the drive ASAP.

I see it everyday, people not caring to backup their data or put precautions like RAID into their systems. But sooner or later they learn that ALL Hard Drives do fail at some point. After that, they are usually pretty good about backups and buying RAID.

By: NeadReport

NeadReport — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 00:29:19 +0000

Our culture stores data like some people hoard possessions; most of it sitting around gathering dust, filling up rooms and being forgotten. What do we really lose when it’s all gone? I see the bigger question being “What to back up?” Not “How much do you back up?” Think “If my house burnt down what info would I miss the most?” Take that answer and move it off site.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 20:16:26 +0000

It all depends how much data you have. I have several terabytes of videos, movies, files, etc, and if my storage dies, it literally takes a week to recover. That’s too long. So I do both RAID and backup. RAID for a quick way to deal with one dead disk, and backup to protect against a major disaster. Just doing one or the other leaves you open to a different kind of problem.

By: Jeff Osborne

Jeff Osborne — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 03:08:56 +0000

I echo the above comment. I thought that RAID is for speed and/or redundancy so it is obviously useful. In the dual wheel example I saw above, it is no good if the 2nd wheel has driven over the same bed of nails but will keep you going if the problem was not that catastrophic. Perhaps we should liken the ‘backup’ as the spare wheel in the boot (newish, good tread, inflated etc). However if that is all you have (ie no dual wheel) then you have to take time out on the side of the road to bring you back. I can live without dual wheels but I would not travel without a spare. Both would be nice.

By: Rob Carty

Rob Carty — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 14:58:44 +0000

I’m a “simple home user” and bought a NAS a year ago to extend the life of my laptop a little more. Using it primarily for data storage, it holds two SATA drives. I opted to have one be a backup to the other rather than RAID because I was more interested in a local backup in case of general drive failure.

To reflect the opinions of an average home user, I thought RAID was more for performance improvement and continuity.

By: Mickey

Mickey — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:04:31 +0000

A raid set up is just not worth it. When it fails, What is Mr. Avg Joe going to do. Most of the IT folks I know are Simpletons. Raid is like this Mythical Unicorn that they will never touch for fear of being turned into dust for even looking at it wrong.

The others see RAID controller on the OS boot screen and think. WOW, Insect repellent.

By: Patrick Wingert

Patrick Wingert — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 16:42:50 +0000

RAID is no good if your backup is sitting in the office when the building burns down (Ask Chapman Ice Cream, this happened to thier former IT manager:
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/todays-paper/Baptism+fire+Chapman+triumphs/3691944/story.html). Then again RAID is no good if the building burns down anyways!

By: Shadowwire

Shadowwire — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 14:58:52 +0000

For a “home user”, or “small business” which I believe this discussion is about, RAID is not appropriate. RAID is great when it works, but I agree with almost everyone. RAID is not a replacement for a backup solution. Many off the shelf NAS backup devices use RAID and work well, and they are easy to use and cheap. Not to say that there shouldn’t be another level of redundancy like an off site and/or tape/DVD/etc, but in the average SOHO Cost and know how will be the limiting factor.
Even in the Medium to Large Businesses that I work for It is difficult to get them to foot the bill for a decent backup solution.
I guess what it comes down to is “What is your Data worth?”.

By: Laura Wood

Laura Wood — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 19:20:22 +0000

Why do people think that RAID means RAID-5? Having used it, I hate RAID-5. As soon as one disk drops out and is replaced (more often due to a cabling problem or other glitch than a real hard failure), the rebuild pass finds a latent bad sector and boom.

Stick with basic RAID-1 and mirror it. For really important data, have three mirrors. It makes reads faster and errors are simple and comprehensible.

All you have to do is buy drives larger than you would need with a RAID-5, and that costs almost nothing these days.

Agreed it’s not a backup, but continuing the above analogy, RAID is like having dual wheels on an 18-wheeler: if one fails, you can *keep going*, with care, until you come to a good stopping place to replace it. Backups are like AAA: planning ahead is far better than getting screwed when you’re desperate after a failure, but you’re still dead in the water for a while.

By: Ton Telsar

Ton Telsar — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 02:16:15 +0000

I think I have most of the bses covered at home with a NAS enclosure and RAID 1. The enclosure holds two drives and I have three drives for it. I use these drives only for data – pictures, videos, 20 years worth of other file accumulation.

Every week or two, when I visit my mom, I pull the secondary drive and take it to her house. When I return, I bring back the drive that I had left over there the last time I visited. I but that drive into the enclosure and let it sync with the primary drive. That gives me offsite backup.

This solution is easy and automatic. The only thing I think I am lacking is to encrypt the data on the drives in case of theft.

By: Mike G

Mike G — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 19:42:02 +0000

When advising back-up over (or in addition to) RAID, what are some of the most economical means for a consumer to backup large amount of data.

I have approximately 4TB of family photos and videos as well as my own work related documents. I also have e-mails from the past 10 years or so. All this is located on several drives (mostly 250GB). I have recently picked up a Sans Digital 4 drive RAID enclosure which I plan to populate w/ 1TB or 2 TB Samsung Spinpoint drives in a RAID 5 array.

My purpose of setting up this array is to consolidate all my files onto one central location. This will allow me to reduce my total capacity by removing the duplicate files (and in many cases, I am sure I probably have 3, 4 and even 5 copies of many files) and also port all my data to newer drives as opposed to the ones that I have had for 5-8 years and should be nearing their end of life.

I understand that by moving everything over to 1 location, I increase my risk that a single failure could be catastrophic. As a result, I am eager to immediately implement a parallel backup solution.

Indeed, I completely understand that if the data itself gets corrupted (because Windows is just such an “amazing, bug-free” OS), the RAID 5 will do me little good in restoring my data (except maybe a bulk of it via some data recovery means – ie, Easy Recover, r-Type, Active Recovery, etc). However, my understanding is that in the event of a physical drive crash (clicking, etc), my data will be secure once I pop in my spare drive…

In other words, I understand that RAID will protect my data against a physical HD issue but not a SW issue.

I did make it a habit to (mostly) copy my pictures off the 4G CF cards from my camera to: (1) my HD; (2) a burned DVD; and (3) the remote server that I use for my personal website hosting.

However, it’s not always easy to get around to burning to disk and my web hosting limit of 300GB is rapidly becoming maxed out. Plus, if my RAID craps out, I have dozens upon dozens DVD’s that would have to be put in one at a time to copy to the new array.

So, from what I can tell, my options are:

1-Pay for an online service and have it sync all my data from the array on a nightly basis. This would require me to pay monthly fees and hope the service does not go out of business or decide to sharply increase their fees once I am married to them.

2-Pay for a second RAID array. Which I would not use as a “mirror,” but rather as an initial copy and then set up incremental sync’ing via a solution such as Allway Sync. For the best protection, I would either have to transport the second array back and forth between a remote location and my location or set it up at my parent’s house or another relative and sync via a VPN or other similar means.

3-Burn everything to DVD which would be VERY time consuming and a monster burden for restoration purposes.

4-Find some sort of software recovery solution that creates “Emergency Rescue” bootable disks. However, I don’t trust these to always work or worse, to restore my data files as opposed to just working enough to get me to boot into Windows.

So, I guess my major point/question is:

What would be the: (1) best; and/or (2) most economical means of achieving the most amount of protection for my data. My feeling is this is the order of what concerns me the most:

1-Price
2-Ability to recover ALL my data.
3-Speed at which recover takes.
4-Ability to expand backup capacity w/o starting from scratch.

Sorry for a very long message. My wife screams at me every time I copy a chip off the camera that she will kill me just before she leaves me if we lose the pictures of the kids…

Thanks!