Rich Freeman wrote: > On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 6:16 PM, Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: >> What I really need to do, set up a RAID or some other backup method so >> that even if this happens again, I don't risk losing anything. Then >> again, that will take time as well. Also takes money. > Keep in mind that RAID is more about speed of recovery and protects > against the failure mode of total drive failure, which is a fairly > common failure mode. A hard drive failure on a RAID involves no > unplanned downtime, and a need for some short planned downtime to > replace the drive. > > Backup protects against a lot more, but typically results in a > recovery that takes hours, and when the drive goes you're down without > warning.
True. My issue with RAID is that it is yet another thing I have to maintain. I started using lvm and so far, it has been low maintenance and has made changing things MUCH easier when I do need to move things around a bit. It is a time saver to be more accurate. RAID also leaves me open to theft, house fire and such too. At the moment, I think, like you, having a external drive that I keep somewhere else is the safest method. Thing is, getting a drive big enough to do this. Buying this drive put a dent in my debt. That said, I really need to buy another drive if this old one turns out to be bad and set up some sort of backup plan. If it turns out to be OK somehow, then I may have a solution, maybe. While I don't want to lose anything, my camera pics is the most important to keep. That's why I rotate backups and keep one set outside the house. I would rather not lose my videos and could get most of them back but it won't be easy for sure. >> Most of that is recorded TV shows, movies etc. I also have some pics I >> took with my camera that can't be replaced. Those I backup to DVDs >> pretty regular. I use kbackup to tarball them and then burn them to >> DVDs. It works. One set is outside the home in case of fire. The >> biggest thing is some of those shows would be hard to get again plus the >> effort to get them as well. > So, stuff like photos I backup to the cloud, or to offsite media > (generally I favor the cloud for active stuff, and offsite media for > stuff I'm done with). Ditto for things like /etc, mysql, documents, > email, and other small but important things. > > For stuff like MythTV recordings I used to just rely on RAID - > recognizing that there was a very real possibility that I could lose > them all. Now I also do a backup to a drive that is normally left > unmounted, which isn't great, but since I moved to btrfs I wanted > something on ext4 that had daily rsnapshots. Again, I'm willing to > risk losing this stuff. > > Rich > > I don't have anything on the cloud to backup too. That would likely be a good idea but I can't afford anything pricey, which is why I hadn't bought a backup drive before now either. Plus, something I'd prefer to keep under my thumb. Heck, some things here are encrypted, bank info and such. Also, while I have DSL, it ain't real speedy. Backing up that much data over my connection could take a while, like days, maybe even a week or more. I really do need a plan that I can manage to put in place tho. Murphy's law and all. :-D Dale :-) :-)
