backup solutions: RAID servers?

[gusl]

I feel uncomfortable knowing that much of my data is only 1HD away from disappearing. Of course, I make backups of the more important stuff, but sometimes it's once every couple of months.

So I'd like some tips on practical, low-maintenance, secure backup solutions. I won't need anything more than ~700GB for the foreseeable future... but scalability is a definite plus! Are there cheap RAID servers that are easy to manage?

Comments

[lo5an.livejournal.com]

RAID really isn't a backup solution. It's can be great when a disk fails, but it doesn't really address getting you back a file you accidentally deleted the previous day. For most of my data, I'm currently backing up to external disk drives.

What platforms are you looking at? And are we talking a couple of workstations or a laptop or what?

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I was thinking I'd get a RAID system on external HDs.
I definitely don't want a large, noisy thing.

[wjl.livejournal.com]

OS X's Time Machine is fast, easy, and low maintenance. It just makes an incremental backup everytime you plug in the appropriate external HD. (The first time you plug an external HD in, it asks you if you'd like to use it with Time Machine.) Then you can easily browse back to any past backed up state to retrieve whatever data you'd like.

I imagine there's something similar for Windows, but I don't know for sure.

[zarex.livejournal.com]

A RAID is nice for fault tolerance but unnecessary for backups. Why not just use an external drive, and run a backup every day?

But if you want a stand-alone RAID, I recommend the Thecus series; I've been pretty happy with it. (4100Pro?)

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

The thing is, I have more things in my external drive than would fit into my machine's HD.

[zarex.livejournal.com]

I'm confused - the backup should go the other way. Can't you just get a new external HD with enough space to hold everything you care about?

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I could buy one more external HD, for a total of 2.

But then whenever I change one, I'd have to update the other one.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I suppose I could make a cron script to copy stuff between the 2 external HDs, but that would be very inefficient, since there's so much data, and most changes are pretty small.

[lo5an.livejournal.com]

You could rotate the drives in a daily backup schedule so that one drive had 1 day old data and one drive had 2 day old data.

Also, you might want to look at a network storage device like the NSLU2. Or an updated version, I guess. Several manufactures make them in a variety of price ranges.

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

you should go to tape backup, old school but reliable and safe

[selfishgene.livejournal.com]

If you can isolate some fraction of that 700GB as 'most important' then you can back it up online. The cost and upload time for 700GB would probably exceed your budget. Or make a second backup disk and store it somewhere else. Then you can use online backup only for new items.
Having my only backup and PC in the same room would make me uncomfortable.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I regularly upload important stuff to servers. But it's much less than 1GB...

I should automate this with a script. But I don't know how to run cron in cygwin...

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Setting up a software RAID under Linux and sharing it out as a network drive isn't too hard.

[kartiksg.livejournal.com]

As has been mention before... RAID is not backup.

I currently have a 5TB RAID array (6x1TB in RAID5) and have about 500GB of "data which, if I lost it, would cause me to be really really pissed off". I simply have 2 older 500GB HDDs which I connect once every month to back up. Data that changes very often is usually very small and is backed up between my laptop and my desktop, by virtue of the fact that it is mostly code and hence under a DVCS (I use hg but switch to darcs one of these days).

It's worked so far. There are a couple times when I went "OH SHIT I didn't mean to delete that" and either got it off the rotating 500GB backup disks (because it was an old binary blob/archive) or just hg reverted it back (because it was live).

YMMV