Server…
So… I’m trying to figure out what disks to use in my web server when I upgrade/replace bornslippy.nuxx.net.
I’m going to do RAID 0+1, so I need four disks. 80GB disks are $60/ea. 160GB disks are $89/ea. (Both prices are for Western Digital Special Edition 8MB 7200RPM 3-Year warranty disks.)
So, for $240 I can have 160GB total space, or for $356 I can have 320GB. The 320GB option would allow me to back up all the data I have to the webserver… Plus $44 for the pair of disk controllers and a few dollars for some brand new round cables.
This could potentially be good, because it’d give me space for absolutely completely offsite backup.
That said, do I really want to shove all my personal data up to what’s essentially a public server? I guess it’d be all right if I did it via an encrypted filesystem that I mount only when doing backups… That would get the data backups completely out of my house.
This space is definitely not used for the existing content of the site, which I believe currently clocks in at around 15GB – 20GB.
Ideas? Ideas?
Your disaster recovery plan for your house is more robust than the one for my office. That’s really frightening. Is the Marriot your designated hotsite?
I won’t tell where my work’s is, but it’s got a huge parking lot and fairly tasty food.
I just don’t want to lose data… And what better backup facility than a colocation provider?
The possibility is there to keep a complete sync of all my music and such… But… Would that really be worth it?
I think it’s relying on too much tech. If it’s a foolproof backup strategy, it’s got to be simple. I think you may be best off burning a copy to DVD and putting it in your parents’ basement. If your data is mutable and it needs backups of incremental changes, I think going to local RAID with a monthly removable media backup would be more feasible and leave less room for failures.
Right now we’re building our DR plan, and it includes me driving around taking tapes from one place to the other. Unfortunately, removing a ton of tapes from each site’s rotation has caused a lot of backups to fail due to lack of expired media. Why rotate tapes if you’re not making good backups in the first place?
Uhm, DVDs hold ~9GB/ea. 120GB of data is cost prohibitive to back up that way.
Local RAID is not a backup, unless I establish an entirely separate box for the data. And then, why not stick it in a machine that is already going offsite?
Right now the cost per gig is about the same for DVD-Rs and hard drives. The portability makes them worth it. Programs like Nero 6 have automated byte-for-byte backup utilities that use decent compression, all you have to do is swap media.
Well, it’s at least protection against individual drive failure, right? If you’re the only user of this data and are relatively responsible about securing it, the risk of stuff like filesystem corruption or viruses is pretty small. If you have the bandwidth to sync to remote disk, go for it, but I think it’s going to a lot of trouble for personal data.
Right now the cost per gig is about the same for DVD-Rs and hard drives.
Sure, but hard drives are rewritable. And I can use one disk in an external enclosure, which is very portable.
Well, it’s at least protection against individual drive failure, right? If you’re the only user of this data and are relatively responsible about securing it, the risk of stuff like filesystem corruption or viruses is pretty small.
It is, but it’s not protection against inadvertent deletion, etc. One should *always* have an offline or otherwise remote backup.
If you have the bandwidth to sync to remote disk, go for it, but I think it’s going to a lot of trouble for personal data.
Syncing takes little bandwidth… It’s only the initial copy which takes a long time, and that can be done while the machine is setting on the LAN at home. Then drop it in place at the colo and only sync changes.
All good points. I’m just inclined to use the KISS rule when implementing any kind of backup strategy.
Yep, which is why I see rsyncing data to somewhere else in the world to be pretty simple.
It just makes a copy, and doesn’t copy unchanged things.
Didn’t know there was a daemon that would do that. As long as it’s proven reliable, go for it.
You normally wouldn’t run it as a daemon. Just call rsync from a cron job every once in a while… Although I suppose you could do some real-time replication somehow, too.
Ahh, now I see how it works. I figured it established a permanent connection with the remote volume and acted like a really, really slow RAID.
offsite is an excellent idea. I’ve used NovaWeb for commercial purposes but the demo can run for 1 user indefinitely.
http://www.network-backup.com/datasheets/overview.html
Hmm, that’s interesting… I think it’s a bit of overkill for what I need. Normally I just use rsync…
I’m starting to think that I should do offsite backups, but not for my ripped music. That’s just overkill… I think a copy on a second, unmounted disk is plenty good. After all, I do still have the originals.