Hummm I see all your points and that is good food for thoughts.
I now see that it is indeed a bad setup for a backup solution. I thought
that for a home user it is not necessarily worse than someone using an
attached drive to its router (Apple Time Capsule for example). Note that
I said "not worse" not that a Time Capsule device is any good by the
standards defined in this discussion.
I guess that's what I had in mind originally, but with OpenBSD, and
thought that the mirrored drives would have the added benefit that if
one drive died, data still survived for a while.
As always OpenBSD users go for the technically correct solution and I
appreciate you guys telling me about it.
That said, my data is not business critical. If I can get Time Capsule
degree of reliability (close to none you'll tell me), it would be a
start. Right now I have nothing. If my desktop hard drive dies,
everything is gone. Only advantage of the desktop machine as opposed to
the server is that it is NOT always on.
So maybe I could start with that and see what's my minimum critical data
set (let's say family pictures) and push that to Tarsnap for offsite
backups.
Thanks for all the constructive and enlightening responses.
Dominik
On 2015-09-29 14:59, Benny Lofgren wrote:
On 2015-09-29 19:51, Devin Reade wrote:
--On Tuesday, September 29, 2015 11:38:00 AM -0600 Devin Reade
<g...@gno.org> wrote:
To the OP, while most of the advice on this thread has been good, I'd
be careful of that one. *Keep* your drives in a mirrored
configuration
and have *additional* disks for backup purposes.
Just to clarify, I was referring specifically to the comment about
not using mirroring; I didn't trim quite enough quoting in my original
response.
And I should perhaps also clarify myself. I was thinking about a
hypothetical scenario where the two disk drives were all we had to work
with, for budget constraint reasons or whatever, but that actual
construct never went from my brain to my fingers... so just to be
absolutely crystal clear: I do *not* recommend doing this! But *if* all
that got stranded on that remote uninhabited island was you, a server
with two disks and a two thousand mile long connected water proof
extension cord, then it would be wise to use one as a backup and the
other to work with. And make sure both are bootable. (And go look for
the keyboard, mouse and screen, they're on that beach SOMEWHERE!)
Regards,
/Benny
