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We are soooooo off travel technology...unless of course you are accessing all these files remotely right? :)
I say screw the RAID. Its there for uptime. Who's going to blep if you can't access the home movies for a week. If its that important, then back it up. And then back it up again and take the second back up offsite. Oops. Geek talk. Take it out of the house and put it somewhere else. So WWMD? (what would moi do?) I'd just get 2 honking 500GB drives in a dual FW800 enclosure and attach it to the G5 which has a gigabit interface. Then I'd pick up some cheap $50 dollar 5 port gigabit switch. Then I'd investigate a tape solution that fits my needs and start rotating tapes. |
Personally, my firm has had bad experiences with Lacie, and cos of that I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole. However DVD is a very good cheap solution, that isn't subject to viruses someone deleting everything by mistake etc. And you can make several copies of the data very easily, which as has been said above some of which can be stored at realtives/friends houses (i.e. off site).
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>(It just keeps growing and at this size there isn't a simple backup strategy).
Sure there is. Just acquire a firewire drive array and write a script that runs late each night and backs up your videos to the array. Seems a lot easier than creating a RAID setup for what is essentially static data. |
Originally Posted by Jimmie76
Personally, my firm has had bad experiences with Lacie, and cos of that I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole. However DVD is a very good cheap solution, that isn't subject to viruses someone deleting everything by mistake etc. And you can make several copies of the data very easily, which as has been said above some of which can be stored at realtives/friends houses (i.e. off site).
Their main problem seems to be a lack of cooling. I've had their "big disk", their "bigger disk' and a DVD recorder die on me :( Nowadays i just build my own external storage with good drives in a force cooled enclosure. |
Originally Posted by ahallflyertalk
There is great backup software out there, such as True Image from Acronis. It will make an exact image of a hard drive and store it on another hard drive. It will also do incremental backups and you can even schedule them. For example, if you have a 400GB backup drive and you have 200GB of videos now, the first image file you make will include all 200GB of videos. If you add two video files next week and re-run incremental backup, the new backup includes only the added files.
True Image is great for making an exact image of your computer hard drive because it allows a complete restoration in the event of upgrade or hard drive failure without having to re-install Windows. But for copying large amounts of data it might not be very efficient, as it would be making very very large single-file backups. Another alternative might be a nifty program called "rsync." This is traditionally a UNIX/Linux copy program but there is a Windows version (which I haven't yet tried). It will make an exact copy of a directory somewhere else. The second time you run it it copies only the changes, so it is very efficient. In UNIX, it is a lifesaver. It's also completely free, at least the Linux version is, probably the Windows version is also. Do a Google for it. It doesn't make drive images, but it does have a feature for system restore in case the OS system files get corrupted or infected. |
As I read over this thread, the posts seem to fall into two groups:
1. If what you say you want to do is really your main goal, forget RAID. That's not what it's meant for and not what it's good at. There are better and cheaper (both at the same time) ways to do it. 2. If this is about playing with RAID, this is as good an excuse as most. Here are some things to try - but you need real backups, too. My post was in category 1, but why not have some geek fun? Let us know what you do and how it turns out. |
Originally Posted by murphy
I would recommend RAID5 for home use. It seems to provide the best cost/reliablity mix for home use.
On another tangent--it is absolutely correct that RAID (any level) is, in and of itself, not a backup strategy per se. It will protect you from a hardware failure. It will allow you a larger logical drive (although this does not require RAID to do). It may speed your disk access somewhat. It will not protect you from accidentally dumping the wrong file into the trash or deleting them (absent the fact it will either happen fast, or twice :) ). As for a backup strategy, well, that's tough. Backing up 500 gigs 8 gB at a time (on DVDs) is only tolerable once and then on an incremental basis (that's what I do with media). For other stuff, I have an OS image (ghost) and make sure my "data" (nonmedia) is on a seperate drive which is regularly taped or toasted to CD/DVD. |
what's wrong with tape?
do 2-3 image snapshots of 1Tb of data and the cost per Gb is going to be so much lower than drives... |
Originally Posted by chichow
what's wrong with tape?
do 2-3 image snapshots of 1Tb of data and the cost per Gb is going to be so much lower than drives... 2) The closest you'll get is a 800/400Gb LTO-3 drive and you are looking at around $4200 for that (4200 = 70 250Gb harddisks). 3) You could pick a cheaper system, with say 120Gb uncompressed but you'd still be looking at a $400 drive, a $120 SCSI card and another $500 in tapes, once again that is over 20 drives. 4) You could try finding a used tape library like this one but 15*DLT7000 is still only 525Gb... Plus most of them need a non-standard SCSI card, like a LVdiff card... All in all, I suggest a crapload of HDD's, in external exclosures and put away in a nice water/fireproof safe. |
I guess it the data is truly static, then you don't really need to worry about file system corruption or an errant delete so that for peace of mind you could buy the external drives and put them into a safe somewhere...but if its really this important then I would have 2 sets. One for home. and one in the safe.
I'd still do the tape solution, but that's because I used to be a Unix system administrator. For home, I wouldn't mind swapping tapes during an evening once in a blue moon. I'd leave it up to the backup program to span tapes. |
It looks quite similar to what I'm in the process of installing now. It holds 4 SATA drives in the space for 3, it provides a cooling fan, overtemp sensor and hot-swap capability. It has no controller on it, though, the SATA leads are simply propagated through for connection to a controller elsewhere. |
Originally Posted by chichow
what's wrong with tape?
do 2-3 image snapshots of 1Tb of data and the cost per Gb is going to be so much lower than drives... |
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I haven't read through the whole thread, but Buffalo make ready-made RAID solutions (their TeraStation) with RAID-5 as an option. Available in 0.6TB, 1TB and 1.6TB capacities (less if you choose RAID5 due to redundancies), you can attach it via Gigabit Ethernet which should provide more than enough bandwidth.
They also have a COM-port for UPS-triggered safe shutdown, which is excellent if you live in a frequent outage area. Finally, they also have additional USB ports which you can plug in further external HDs either as a secondary backup, or additional space. |
thread back to life
Buy two of these: then your done. Keep one at home. Keep the other one at the office or the bank vault or whatever. Yeah its Lacie but its not that bad. http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/Produc...liate=dealnews |
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