[Currawong]

I run Time Machine (the benefits of owning a Mac) and also backup using Backblaze. Large media such as family movies etc. is on multiple hard drives and quite a bit backed up online.

 

[estreeter]

HardDrive, with a moniker like that I guess I shouldnt be surprised to find that you are fanatical about backups !

 

[Finnegans]

Half of my digital library is copied to three separate drivers (one external), so its x3 back up, but the other half is not (yet).

 

[elrod-tom]

I have my CD's ripped to a single drive that I use on my home network.  I don't like the idea of re-ripping all my CD's, but if it happens it's not THAT big a deal as long as I have the CD's and can actually do the re-ripping.
 
If I don't have any physical media (e.g. HDTracks or LivePhish), I have it copied onto two separate external drives on two separate computers that are both used in my home music server.  If one drive goes, I still have the other.  I've also taken the added precaution of copying these files to DVD-ROM discs and keeping them at the office.  This gives me an extra added measure of protection, and has the added benefit of making some really great music available for listening at work. 

 
To this I would also add: be prepared in the event that you ever need to file an insurance claim.  Insurance adjusters get very flaky about replacing CD's, and can be a complete PITA who just don't get it when the subject turns to something that didn't come with physical media.  Trust me on this one...I have first hand experience.

 

[ninjikiran]

Raid Mirroring.
 
Quote:

I'm considering backing up my backup.

 

[DougofTheAbaci]

Two things:
 
(1) RAID != Backup. RAID gives you performance and redundancy, to different degrees depending on how you do it. It does not, however, protect you from software errors or human errors. For example, if you corrupt the filesystem in a RAID the entire array will go down and you will lose everything. If a program, virus, or human deletes a bunch of files on your RAID1 array your files are still gone no matter what.
 
(2) The best backup plan is known as the 3:2:1 system. Three copies, two local, one remote. You have the working copy on your system which is backed up to a second copy locally. Ideally the backups are done often, automatically and are versioned so data isn't immediately lost. This is further backed up either over the net or manually to a third backup somewhere else in the world. One tactic I know works rather well is to back everything up to a large HDD or two and them leave them in a bank's safe deposit box.
 
My problem is that if I decided to back up everything right now I'd be looking at 3 TB of data. What I'm actually looking into doing is implementing a ZFS storage pool. It gives you all the benefits of RAID but it's at the filesystem level so no reliance on hardware that can fail or software that can be hacked. It also uses a high-fault-protection system for writing new entries so even if your system loses power right as it's writing the file directory it won't be corrupted.
 
The only issue is that ZFS isn't greatly supported outside a few Linux distros... For now.
 
But yes, in an ideal world you should back up everything you can't stand to lose. Right now, my entire computer is backed up hourly (thank you, Time Machine) and I'm looking to extend that to a couple of 3 TB drives so I can back up everything.

 

[ninjikiran]

Thats why you use an external enclosure with raid capability.  It allows you to easily have 2x backups, if one drive goes down you still have the other, a backup for the backup?  Of course you can go with just two drives, would be easier and you could store them in two different physical locations.

 

[Somnambulist]

I don't have it yet, but I'm probably going to go with a Drobo (the FW800 DAS version as I don't want a NAS solution currently) for storage/local backup, then use my ISPs online backup facility to have a remote copy.

 

[estreeter]

Quote:

 
To this I would also add: be prepared in the event that you ever need to file an insurance claim.  Insurance adjusters get very flaky about replacing CD's, and can be a complete PITA who just don't get it when the subject turns to something that didn't come with physical media.  Trust me on this one...I have first hand experience.

 
Good point, and I posted here recently asking if folk had specific insurance for their kit - zero responses. I magine trying to convince an (already suspicious) assessor that you had 5 fullsize amps, 3 expensive DACs, 15 pairs of headphones and numerous portable components. Add the loss of physical media as you have described and fire or theft would be a catastrophe.
 
People, take photos and itemise *everything*. Photocopies of receipts/invoices and always put yourself in the position of someone who knows absolutely zero about this obsession. Accountants get by with a lot less than photographic proof, but I'm guessing that very few of us are accountants.
 
 

 

[DougofTheAbaci]

 
Quote:

Thats why you use an external enclosure with raid capability.  It allows you to easily have 2x backups, if one drive goes down you still have the other, a backup for the backup?  Of course you can go with just two drives, would be easier and you could store them in two different physical locations.

I'm going ZFS. I did a bunch of research today and have made my decision. I'll tell you why:
 
Stability/Protection: RAID is secure from a single-drive failure, but that's about it. The data can rot just as easily and become corrupted on a RAID1 as it can on a single HDD. ZFS, however, has built-in safe-guards that keep your data from becoming corrupted and auto-checks files as they are read and written. It also can survive from a single or multi-HDD failure, just like RAID5 or RAID10 but doesn't suffer from the write-errors RAID does. You will never lose all your data because of a write error with ZFS but you can with RAID.
 
Cost: Let's say you wanted a four-drive RAID5 array. You need to buy the enclosure and then the four drives. 2 TB drives will cost you $80 and are the biggest bang for your buck right now. The enclosure, however, is going to run you $400, and that's a basic enclosure without some of the more advanced RAID features, such as RAID migration. All told that's about $720. That's not too bad for 6 TB of storage. (Remember, RAID5 is N-1 capacity.) But what of ZFS? Well, there's no RAID hardware necessary so you only need individual hard drives or a JBOD enclosure. In my case, I'm considering a $70 Macally FW800 enclosure. I'll need four of those. So the total is $600. That's the same performance (slightly better if what I've heard is true) with the same capacity. Not to mention better stability and protection from data loss.
 
Management: In order to do anything relatively advanced with RAID you need to go command-line. The same is true of ZFS. However, from what I've seen, ZFS is extremely easy to setup. Two short lines in Terminal and I'm ready to go. RAID can be a bit more complex, not by much but just enough to make me rethink it. Then there's expansion. Some RAID arrays you can't expand at all. You can only recreate from scratch. This means either destroying the current array (and losing all data) or getting an entirely new RAID and copying the data over. That's a significant addition in cost. ZFS you just tell it to include a new drive in the pool with a quick command line. With both, usually, repairs are automatic. However, RAID doesn't check for file-level corruption. You have to do it yourself. ZFS does and handles it on it's own without bugging you.
 
Expansion: As I've already said, ZFS is easy to expand where RAID isn't always, but there's more to it. RAID uses the default OS filesystem so it has a theoretical limit. ZFS does as well... But it's in the zetabyte range. Or, 1,000,000,000,00 GB of space. I remember reading something which made a joke out of that amount of storage, if it was ever achieved, would have to break a number of the laws of quantum mechanics. So, in other words, you are never, ever going to hit the ceiling of ZFS. Granted, the others have a limit in the EB range (one set of thousands less) but still... ZFS goes to 11!
 
With stability and data-protection RAID doesn't come close to ZFS. At all. They both protect against hardware failures but RAID does nothing for errors on the file-level. With cost, ZFS is extremely cheap in comparison. Management they're relatively similar but there are a few key areas where ZFS behaves just that much more.
 
So yeah RAID is evil. Where it's used best is for performance, not data integrity. RAID0 is the fastest you can go. Heck, when Apple announced Thunderbolt, the only way they could max out the throughput was with five SSD RAID0 array. But that's now what I'm looking for, I'm looking for something that will protect my data, not access it faster than my computer can run.

 

[estreeter]

I get that people would be using Time Machine, but isnt a complex RAID strategy just a little over-the-top ? Unless you are constantly ripping new music to your hard drives, it seems like overkill for mine. Of course, I understand that people have data-other-than-music on their hard drives, but when we start striping and mirroring a RAID array, complete with a dedicated (hardware) controller, I think some of us may have just stepped over the line into the Land of Obsession. Still, better safe than sorry.
 
This thread has certainly been an education - I actually expected a few objections along the lines of 'why bother ? I have the CDs anyway', but it has been the exact opposite.

 

[WarriorAnt]

I use Time Machine right now.  I use to lose hard drives pretty often then I got an APC battery backup/surge protection unit.  It has helped a lot (knocking on all the wood in my house, twice).   I love the big drives but they can also spell big disaster.  I had one drive go down a while back and I couldn't get it going to make a recovery, then someone said for me to put the drive in the freezer and then try it.  It sounded really stupid. But then I got real desperate and  I tried it and it worked.  I was able to grab stuff from it one more time.
 

 

[WarriorAnt]

Quote:

I don't have it yet, but I'm probably going to go with a Drobo (the FW800 DAS version as I don't want a NAS solution currently) for storage/local backup, then use my ISPs online backup facility to have a remote copy.

The Drobo looks nice, I've always wondered about it.  Let us know how it goes if you get it.

 

[DougofTheAbaci]

I've heard... Mixed things about Drobos, myself. I considered going that direction due to the ease of use but I ended up walking away. I know a few people who have them and swear by them. And then I've read some real horror stories... For me, the reason I walked away is because the Drobo is a software RAID and as far as I know if your unit dies your data goes with it.
 
One of the reasons I went with ZFS was because it has no hardware dependencies. As far as I can tell, if I were to take the drives in a ZFS zpool and drop them in a different enclosure and attach them on a new computer, they'd show up just fine.
 
But yeah, I love Time Machine. Not because it's a backup system, there are better backup solutions than Time Machine. I like it because I can roll back individual files over the past month. "Crap, I changed the wrong file. Crap. I didn't back it up. Crap! That's two days of work gone! Oh, wait... Yay, Time Machine!" Saved my bacon more times than I'd care to count, like when I spend a few days designing a complex page layout in Photoshop and open the file to use it as a basis for a new page, do a bunch of work and then press save instead of save as... Oops.
 
(This is also why I invested in 8 more GBs of RAM and now save back the last 100+ steps in Photoshop.)

 

[Somnambulist]

The problem is that I have no access to the router I get my internet from, therefore I can't look at any NAS solutions, so I need a DAS. If I did have access, then I wouldn't be looking at the Drobo.The other problem is that there's nothing other than the Drobo that will let me say, start off w/2x2TB and 2x1TB drives, then over the course of a few months swap the 1TBs out for 2TBs, then maybe in a couple of years, swap them all out one by one for 3 or 4TB drives (the Drobo has a theoretical limit of 16TB). Once I have my own place with my own router, and probably a bit of a Cat6 cabling, I will probably look at UnRAID as a long-term, high capacity storage solution, until then, I need something that has room for future expansion that will let me chop and change different drives.
 
Most problems I read about the Drobo tend to be with the NAS models, slow speeds, noisy e.t.c. Ultimately the main thing I want to be storing on it is CD rips and Time Machine, which means if the worst came to the worst and the Drobo blew up or suffered some fatal fault, it won't be too damaging. I won't be using it for anything fancy.