Back up back up Back up!!

[nervejammer]

Hey blood pumps - today i have been a forward thinking adult for once....I have downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner for the mac and cloned my start up drive and all settings & preferences to an external drive which can be used as a boot drive if the worst ever happens. ( which it had - twice in a row)
Really - it was so simple to do - dont think like i used to, that it wont happen to me - get it backed up folks )

[Lost to the Void]

Or run a RAID system where you are always backed up

[Ant]

RAID systems aren't backups. RAID is used to add fault tolerance or improve disk read and write performance or both.
Fault tolerant RAID are either a mirror or and stripped set with parity, and in those situations if you lose a drive you are able to continue working. But if you lose two drives for some reason you lose everything.

RAID is great, but not a substitute for backup.

Online backup is the best solution these days, assuming you have a decent Internet connection.

Carbonite or Crash plan are good services and worth the cost.

[Lost to the Void]

How is raid not a backup?
IF you run as mirror then if a drive fails, you are gravy, pop in another drive, reset RAID.

In the unlikely event of both drives failing, well, your fucked, no different to backing up to a backup drive and that failing.

[Ant]

Fault tolerance is different from backup. If you accidentally delete a file, you can restore it from a backup. Fault tolerant drives won’t help with that at all.

RAID drives are used for high availability. Servers will use RAID drives and redundant power supplies and, for that matter, co-located failover servers so that no matter what goes down the server (or the failover server) can do its job.

Also RAID 1 (which doesn’t have any fault tolerance) was used in high end workstations to increase HDD performance.

Backup is about disaster recovery. Losing a hard drive is only one scenario, there are lots more. Theft, fire and flood are the obvious ones. Using RAID or an external drive sat on your computer isn’t going to cut it in these situations. Off-site backup, preferably with a file retention policy, is the best option.

I guess it depends if your data is worth anything.

[Ant]

This is good for home users:

http://www.crashplan.com/

$50 per year for unlimited data storage. The first backup will take a while, it is best to set it up to run overnight (most ISPs don't count overnight usage if you are limited). After the first backup the rest will be quite quick.

[Lost to the Void]

If you delete a file before you back it up then it`s gone too.

Sure, backing up externally is the best possible option, but how many people can realistically do that with average connections and costs?

You can set up a RAID system cheaply however.

I simply run a raid, and then back up to external units, which get dated and stored, at the moment. I mean I might consider using external backup once I get a much faster upload speed (fuck you branson where is my free speed doubling happening?), but currently it just isn`t realistic for me. I do deal in a lot of data though, lots of 24bit audio.

But yeah, if cost and connection speed are not an issue then backing up to a cloud is the way for sure.

But if not, I highly recommend running a Raid Mirror system along with backing up externally, it`s cheap, and in the 5 years I`ve been running RAID, I haven`t had an OH NO moment.

[Wiu]

I just have an external hooked up to my Mac Pro that backs up every hour or so with Time Machine. I do my thing. It does its thing. Simple.

I'm guessing if some cunt broke in here and I wasn't about to repel them with my axe that they'd steal the external too, in which case, yeah, I'd be fucked too. Out of interest, any links for backing up online? It's not something I've ever considered or know anything about.

[Ant]

My advice is if you can do both RAID and online backup, great. But if you can only afford one, go with the backup. It is like insurance, it is annoying paying for it especially if you never use it but if you have nice stuff you need it.

Also, unless you spend some serious money on a RAID controller you will get a performance hit using RAID 0 (mirroring). Although it won't be noticable.

Out of interest, any links for backing up online? It's not something I've ever considered or know anything about.

ww.crashplan.com

[Lost to the Void]

I've never noticed any performance hit running raid 0 at all, but I do have a custom build very high spec studio workstation where I never have performance issues at all.

Actually thinking about it, backing up online for the every day, part time user is probably not to much of an issue.
But when you are dealing with terabytes of data, which I do, it's not an option until I get a 5 or 10 meg upload rate for a good price

[Patriek]

I am using time machine and sync my whole OS and crap to my NAS every now and then. And i have an extra backup for all my tracks i bought. And my NAS is 'raid1' (in fact it's X-raid, some netgear solution). And since i am an uber nerd, i have 2 NAS devices in my house. So i make backups from my backups

Raid1 is nice to have, as long as you make actual backups to some external device

[ARiFF]

why not go for raid 10 ? Striped mirrors works perfect aswell. If one of the striping disks crashes, there's nothing to worry about since they're being mirrored aswell. Or if you really want : raid 30 : striped parity mirrors. Need a couple of disks for it, but its worth the money. You can nest all sorts of RAID types, according to what you need. I'm not a huge fan of cloud backups and stuff like that, basically because i want my data to be stored where i can access it, not where a multi-billion dollar company decides to put it. It wont take long before they will start screening those backup sets im sure about that.

I can see the scenario's already where you have your backup stored somewhere, the moment you need it there's going to be all sorts of shit. What if the hosting of the backup increases the costs dramatically, or hold your data hostage untill you pay for an extra fee to "get your data back".... Might be me, but i foresee big brother kind off scenario's of all sorts.

Get a NAS with a gigabit connection on it, put it somewhere in house where you least expect floods or fires. Something i tell my customers a lot is : Buy decent harddrives. Dont get those cheap hard drives a la WD Green and companions but go for the more expensive ones which have decent specs and reliability.

[Patriek]

In the end, any backup solution can fail
Doing a backup to a NAS in your house and something off-site would be the best option if you ask me.

Then again, backups are for pussy's! Living on the edge baby

[ARiFF]

In the end, any backup solution can fail
Doing a backup to a NAS in your house and something off-site would be the best option if you ask me.

Then again, backups are for pussy's! Living on the edge baby

yeah baby ! Rock'n'roll !!

[Mslwte]

What you need is a back up system for the back up's, back up system!

Great post roddy. It's something I have been doing for the last few years is backing up at the end/beginning of the year. I actually bought a new hard drive last night. True.