ajkidle wrote: > What then *is* a backup plan? I'm not sure I understand this line of > argument. If my HDD fails, I lose my FLAC library ... which I have > spent countless hours ripping, tagging, etc. How is a secondary back-up > drive a more robust solution than RAID 1? > > And although I understand the off-premise argument, I'm not interested > in taking it that far. If my house burns down, I'll have bigger > problems to worry about. RAID 1 is fine for protecting against HDD failure, which will eventually happen. RAID 1 is also good for avoiding downtime, because if one HDD fails you can immediately switch over to the other. I fail to see the need for zero downtime for a home music library, but your mileage may vary. And RAID 1 is automatic, which is good for people who don't have a real system for regular backups. Beyond those few specific things, RAID 1 won't help you.
A good backup plan protects against more than HDD failure. Because even though HDD failure is inevitable, a lot of other bad things can happen long before the HDD dies. A good backup plan protects against: - user error. Say you're doing a mass re-tagging operation and you screw up. Under RAID 1 that screw up is automatically replicated on the 2nd drive, and you're screwed. With a separate backup, you can recover from the mistake easily. - software error. For example, a bug in some program corrupts all your FLAC files. Again, RAID 1 immediately replicates that error to the 2nd drive. With a separate backup you can recover. - other hardware failure. Sometimes RAID controller cards go ka-blooey, and you end up with crap on all your RAID discs. - outside events, like power surges, fire, flood, theft, etc. Even if you use a separate external drive, don't leave it always plugged in to the computer, so that one power surge takes out the primary and the backup. If you don't want to store it off-premises, at least store it in another room. Same for theft - I had a student who was finishing his dissertation and was burglarized, and the thief took his laptop, the USB drive sitting next to the laptop, and threw in the computer bag (also sitting next to the laptop) and ran off, taking several months of the student's life as he reconstructed his work. Personally, I fail to see the logic of -"If my house burns down, I'll have bigger problems to worry about."- If you value those countless hours of ripping and tagging, or if you have any other digital documents that are important to you (photos, videos, financial documents, emails) then what you're really saying is "If my house burns down, I think I'll compound the problem by throwing my digital files on top of the flames." If you're the type who does infrequent backups, then RAID 1 _plus_ a separate backup disk kept in another location would be the best solution. The RAID 1 will take care of any changes in-between backups to the separate drive, and the separate drive will give you protection against the many things that RAID 1 does not protect against. I also use an MSI nettop 100 for my server, running Debian instead of Vortexbox -- it's a good little machine. For my backup purposes I regularly do backups from all the computers in the house including the music server to a NAS that I have tucked away in a closet in another part of the house. I also have an external USB drive that I keep at my workplace. Every month or so I bring the USB drive home and sync it with the NAS, and take it back to work the next day. It's not bulletproof -- but it offers me a good degree of protection and most of all, it is easy to maintain. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ aubuti's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2074 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=98350 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
