Foo - Back Up! For The Love Of God! Back Up!

I didn't :(

This is going to be a looooong week for me and my computer.

ouchies

this is exactly why I like to be fred with my computers... RAID1 + backup computer also equiped with RAID1 and all the same settings as the main computer......

My nomadic lifestyle makes carrying around a lot of extra backup hardware annoying... and makes my laptop even more prone to disaster :(

I was just talking a week or two ago with a friend about the need to back up. Meh.

Also, for the record: AppleCare isn't quite as all-powerful as I had been led to believe.

I've been using Linux with RAID on my server since college (a few h/w upgrades along the way) and I haven't lost any data since about 1995. I have lost a few drives, though...

RAID FTW...

RAID FTW...
No way. Offsite storage FTW. All you need is a fast network connection and there's no way to lose your data. RAID can't help if your computer is stolen...

No way. Offsite storage FTW. All you need is a fast network connection and there's no way to lose your data. RAID can't help if your computer is stolen...

winner!
:thumb:

No way. Offsite storage FTW. All you need is a fast network connection and there's no way to lose your data. RAID can't help if your computer is stolen...

Of course offsite storage is a necessary addition to sound hardware fault tolerance, but it is not a substitute, and certainly to say that "no way is RAID FTW" is just asinine. :)

Of course offsite storage is a necessary addition to sound hardware fault tolerance, but it is not a substitute, and certainly to say that "no way is RAID FTW" is just asinine. :)
Hardware fault tolerance is only important if you need to minimize downtime and you want backups to be as recent (i.e. up to the minute) as possible. Loss of data is more likely to result from user behavior such as downloading malware or simply modifying/destroying things inadvertently than it is to result from HD failure.

HD failures can and do happen, but RAID is overkill for most home applications. Plus, it drives up cost and there is a performance penalties for RAID1.

For most home use, offsite storage by itself is adequate, particularly if snapshots are taken or you back up to more than one site.

Okay, I read the thread title and honestly had no idea this would be about computer data! I was seriously expecting something about trucks, or maybe hot chicks. Or hot chicks in trucks.

I heard a trash truck's back up alarm beeping in my mind as I read the title. Imagine my disappoint to find out this was about computers and quickly devolved into techno babble that makes my peanut sized brain hurt.

I think Bob Ross had the best idea. Maybe we can combine his and mine and have a trash truck back into a Hooters.

With this and the Linus thread, you must be sorely disappointed with Foo today, jsharr.

Back Up! For The Love Of God! Back Up!

You're on my dogmad foot!!!!

With this and the Linus thread, you must be sorely disappointed with Foo today, jsharr.

Maybe I should go to the Chinese place here in town and get chicken with peanuts for lunch.

Maybe I should go to the Chinese place here in town and get chicken with peanuts for lunch.

Ah, the Jimmy Carter Special. They still have that, eh?

Ah, the Jimmy Carter Special. They still have that, eh?

No, they ran out of Billy Beer, which was included on the special, so they now just call it Chicken with Peanuts.

Drobo (http://www.drobo.com/) FTW.

Small, hot swapable, plug and play raid.

Dude - USB external HD are getting ridiculously cheap, you know.

Man, it was so nice when a full backup consisted pretty much of the web browser bookmarks file, the mail file/directory, and ~/.* (at least the ones pertaining to configuration).

Now it's tough. Over 20GB of photographs alone. I'll admit that I haven't backed things up in a good, long while. It worries me. At least I don't have to worry about Windows randomly defecating all over itself on a regular basis anymore.

Drobo (http://www.drobo.com/) FTW.

Small, hot swapable, plug and play raid.That's pretty rad. Good to see such a device using Firewire, too, instead of pretending like USB 2 is worth a damn.

Drobo (http://www.drobo.com/) FTW.

Small, hot swapable, plug and play raid.

I was about to mention this little gizmo too :D

I tried a demo of it last summer and it's really awesome.
Ability to use mismatching sizes
upgrading total disk size on the fly
hot swap capable...

oh the abuse it can take... so good
It's on my list of gizmos to get :)

Backups really need a multi-pronged approach.

First, if you can do it, I really like a dedicated backup server with Retrospect or Backup Exec. Something that can initiate backups by itself, so if malware hits a client, it won't be passed to the server. This is very expensive though. Next best thing is a decently secure NAS, and have machines back up to a share. At the minimum, hook up an external hard disk (preferably a Drobo) to the machine to do daily backups with Vista's backup utility.

Second, use Mozy or a known good service to have documents auto-copied offsite. This won't restore a machine from scratch, but your documents will be safe. Mozy also encrypts documents before going to the server, which is a big plus in my book.

Last, consider some offsite system, usually the best thing next to tape drives would be several external hard disks that get swapped off and on site every couple weeks.

Backups have to be multi-pronged, but one needs to factor in stuff like if your office or home gets trashed (fire, tornado, bad battery swallowing contest). Also, make sure to back up critical data to more places, but also consider a image backup so you can restore a machine from scratch pretty easily.

Right now I have the same look on my face that a dog has when you tell it a joke.

RAID is for fault tolerance, not backup. If you accidentally delete a critical file on a RAID system, RAID will not help you recover it.

Ideally, you need RAID and a reliable backup/restore solution.

RAID is for fault tolerance, not backup. If you accidentally delete a critical file on a RAID system, RAID will not help you recover it.

Ideally, you need RAID and a reliable backup/restore solution.

stop deleting critical files or overwriting when you make a small change to files :rolleyes: :D

Well, I've been given the address of a data recovery place, so I'll be heading there in the morning. Applecare is useless in this case because the official Mac repair places can't do hardcore data recovery. They were perfectly willing to swap my old hard drive for a new one (with OS upgrade), but wouldn't let me keep the old one, too. If I had backed up, that wouldn't be a problem, but of course I had not.

Hardware fault tolerance is only important if you need to minimize downtime and you want backups to be as recent (i.e. up to the minute) as possible. Loss of data is more likely to result from user behavior such as downloading malware or simply modifying/destroying things inadvertently than it is to result from HD failure.

HD failures can and do happen, but RAID is overkill for most home applications. Plus, it drives up cost and there is a performance penalties for RAID1.

For most home use, offsite storage by itself is adequate, particularly if snapshots are taken or you back up to more than one site.

True statements (and an excellent point about malware/viruses), but, hardware downtime is usually a PITA no matter if it's home or business use, and hard drives are cheap. The performance hit for RAID1 is very minimal and is usually undetectable at the UI level. Maybe you meant to say RAID5? That is more profound, especially on pseudo-controllers that require the O/S driver to calculate the parity. In either case, I doubt someone using MS-Office most of the time is going to notice.

Hard drives are cheap and the pseudo-controllers do work well enough for home use, contrary to computer-nazi beliefs, so it ends up being very cheap insurance against hardware failure. I never said that offline backups were not needed.

I've lost several drives over the last decade and have been very thankful for hardware fault tolerance, and not a single person I've convinced to use RAID and who has experienced a failure has ever come back and told me they regretted it.

The full-on approach of Dual mirrored servers, each with real RAID, a private redundancy link, on-site tape, and real-time off-site backup is indeed overkill for home use, but a home user with pseudo-Raid, an online backup solution, and a ghosted image of the installed base is not being over-cautious.

One neat trick for safer web browsing is to have a read-only VM just for that purpose. At least then attacks are confined to the VM and won't have access to private local data. I know of several places where this is actually policy...

Funny thing about computer people. The phrase "we're in violent agreement" has come up more than once :)

edit: one other thing to point out is that, if you're a service provider, selling RAID is also cheap insurance against you having to spend warranty time to re-install someone's system. MTTR drops significantly if all you have to do is replace the drive and walk away. MTBF decreases with the number of drives in the system, but MTTR drops to nearly zero.