Bill Gradwohl wrote:
Arthur Pemberton wrote:
What if something goes wrong in the chasis, for example, power surge, all teh HDD's go? no?
We've been in the micro computer networking business since 1982. In all that time, I've never seen a power supply fry a drive. I don't doubt it's happened, but I've personally never witnessed it, nor have any of my employees. I have seen a lightning strike take out a whole slew of machines in one shot, but what are the odds of that?
That's just funny and humerous :) In such a case, would two identical HDD's at software RAID 1 (which if I remember correctly is just mirroring) be good enough? OR would it be better to keep the backup/second HDD unmounted and just mount for a scripted backup?
The prob I have I have with the USB solution is that it requires user intervention.
What user intervention? If you use an external drive, it has its own power supply. Just leave it plugged in permanently via its USB cable, if what you're after is a "home" solution.
This is actuall ymy home solution. I actually made my backup script in PHP. I just flip on the power switch for my USB enclosure which interface to an ATA HDD , and does script does is stuff, and I switch off after.
However I'm planning this for a smal business. As I'm sure you're aware normal employees (ie. non geek, or computer centric) shouldnt' really be trusted with anything computer, so if possible, I woudl prefer not to rely on them to switch on the USB HDD to allow it to backup.
Even for a business, you can script rsync operations to fit X number of snapshots on to a single disk, so that you only NEED to touch it every few weeks after its filled up with umteen generations. User intervention every long while isn't so bad - is it?
You seem to have alot more experience than I. So I'm hoping you could tell me.
BTW - We're getting our clients used to living without tape backups, opting for disk based backup solutions in a variety of forms. I mean real disk, not CD-ROM or DVD. One client has a box with 6TB of disk capacity. Only 2TB is their data. The other 2+2TB is for backup using two 12 port 3Ware Escalade controller and a large hot swap backplane. Works like a charm.
All I can say is COOL!!
You can look up D2D or even D2D2T on Google to get some idea of what industry is doing.
