The hard drive on our server crapped out yesterday, the one with all survey and gis data plus all marketing and administrative data .
Luckily, I had ghosted the servers program and data drives just two days earlier.
There were definately some tense moments when we could not get the new hard drive to jive up with the backups, after 8 solid hours of screwing around with it, I am right back where I was a few days ago, feels good too.
When you use norton ghost it ghosts the entire drive and restores everything, every little detail, no programs to install, no loss of passwords, all favs in tact, bookmarks, email settings...
That is why on our servers I have raid drive. Then I also do tape backups and backups to the internet. If that stuff goes poof. Our business goes POOF!
I'll have to agree with Mr. Scotland. Hot swappable RAID drives are the best. The first time I was shown "hot swappable", I was blown away. That was very late 80s. The dude reached in and pull out a hardrive off our network and no one noticed. Then he plugged it back in and pulled out the primary company's drive. I about had kittens on the spot!! Then he plugged the other back in. Still, no one noticed.
I was the Sr. technical person in that company at the time. If the top-dogs would have seen that little demonstration they would have had more than kittens.
"poop" a gold brick is more like it. Well, not likely it would have been gold.
Scary indeed.
I have our main NAS raided to itself (whatever that means). Basically a mirror of the main drive unto the exact same type of drive setting right beside it in the case. And then I back up the last 5 years worth onto Mozy daily. Everything over 5 years gets sent to DVD archive and stored in the Boss Hogg safe.
A really easy way to get some "cloud storage" for backup is Dropbox.
http://db.tt/JfyR4S8
Watch the video there.
It offers 2 Gbytes free, more for rent, with automatic backup and synchronization of whatever you put in a particular folder structure on your computer. Those files are available from anywhere by logging in. If you have several computers linked to your DB account, it will always copy the latest version of every file to all the other computers.
Full disclosure: registering with the above link will get both you and me an extra quarter gig of storage.
Ain't 'puters fun at times?...
Mirror drives are nice, but biggest problem is speed and performance. They really suck the juice off a computer. Actually, that is a form of raid. I had another computer with that setup and wow. So I chose raid 5 which is basically 3 hard drives. I get a terabyte of storage and if one crashes, the other two can rebuild a new drive. Haven't had one go yet (knocking on wood). Bottom line is any backup is better than none!
> Everything over 5 years gets sent to DVD archive and stored in the Boss Hogg safe.
"DVD archive" may be a misnomer. I'd be very reluctant to rely on writable DVD media for long-term storage. There is no such thing as an archival-quality writable DVD, at least not yet. There's some evidence that suggests that writable DVDs may have a shorter life span than CD-R. My own experience with CD-R is that they can start going bad around year 5, and most of them are unreadable by year 10.
I recommend cloud storage, preferably from a vendor that stores customer data on multiple servers (unlike Mozy or Carbonite). However, if you're going to use optical media for archiving, buy the good (read: expensive) ones, and store them vertically in an environment featuring controlled temperature and humidity. And whatever you do, don't use rewritable media, which are know to degrade much more quickly.
thanks for the heads up jim. i may need to look into that soon.
what about one of the usb drives? are those good quality for long term?
> what about one of the usb drives? are those good quality for long term?
If you mean USB thumb drives, you'd think that they'd be pretty much bulletproof. However, I've had several cheapies crap out on me. The NVRAM itself is probably okay -- there's not really much that can go wrong with it -- but maybe the inexpensive ones use USB interface hardware that's not very reliable.
I've spoken with a couple of professional archivists on the matter, and they tell me that the only realistic long-term plan at this point in our technological development is to transfer archival data onto modern media at regular intervals (intervals in this context being denominated in years). The appeal of the cloud is that this will effectively happen in the background as the data centers upgrade equipment in their natural efforts to increase reliability while driving down cost.
The major drawback to cloud storage is the upstream bandwidth limitations that most of us have to put up with. I recently set my wife up with a Carbonite account. (She doesn't need business-class reliability, so the lack of redundancy in Carbonite's technical approach is acceptable for her purposes.) She currently has about 70GB of data to store, and it's uploading at the rate of about 2.3GB per day. It shouldn't be a big deal once the initial upload completes, but for now checking the upload status is like watching paint dry.
Around 2002 my former boss was running a server with 4 10,00 rpm SCSI drives in a raid backed up by a tape drive. The tape backup ran at night and tapes were rotated so that we always had a current backup and also the ability to go back 4 weeks. The Titanic of servers worked great for 3 yrs. until one morning as I returned to my work area, I saw smoke pouring out of the power supply fan.
The power supply failed catastrophically, apparently sending line voltage to the servers innards. Every printed circuit board in the machine was fried including the boards on the HD's. Hours later when I had a new machine operational, I tried loading the backup only to find out that the tape backup had been malfunctioning for weeks. It was supposed to backup and verify each night, and it never logged a single error or failed backup.
I learned the hard way that raid drives and tape back-ups are neither a complete solution nor a foolproof solution. Now I run my HD's in a raid, backup nightly to a NAS, and manually backup to DVD weekly.
I need to up my game by moving a backup off site, but I don't like the thought of some faceless company having potential access to all my data. I'll probably go low tech and put a firesafe in my outbuilding to store a duplicate of my most current DVD backup.
Be vary wary of that...
RAID is not backup. You can still lose everything from your RAID5 in a variety of ways.
RAID0 uses two disk drives as one, speeding up access, since half of each file gets written to each drive, and both drives are writing at once. RAID1 uses two drives, and writes the same data to each drive. When combined with hot-swappable drives, this gives you the ability others have mentioned, where a drive can fail, you can replace it, and nobody even notices.
A really nice thing for servers is to put a RAID10 on them, which combines the RAID0 and RAID1, giving you the benefits of both. But even a server with RAID10 should also have off-site backups created regularly.
I lost a hard drive in 2008, and ultimately got all of it back, but the loss in time was significant. Now, I do an incremental backup every night around 3 AM to a separate HD (outside of the computer!) and a new full backup once a month. I also backup my docs and projects stuff every night offsite.
I tend to ghost my original setup of the OS and programs and any major updates, but day to day I focus on keeping the data backups current. I keep my OS and programs on one HD and my data on a two-drive mirror (raid1?). The drive with the OS acts like an early warning system. It's usage is higher and will start to show signs of distress before the data drives. This doesn't keep your computer from dying, but it tends to protect the data drives. An added benefit is that if you have another machine loaded with your production software you can install one of your data drives in that machine and be up and running with no data loss in short order.
I've used this setup for ten years and while I've had to recover the OS drive 3 times (two drive failures, one virus), I've never had to load one of my data backups.
Check this out!
Its free
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_SkyDrive
> The hard drive on our server crapped out yesterday, the one with all survey and gis data plus all marketing and administrative data .
>
> Luckily, I had ghosted the servers program and data drives just two days earlier.
>
> There were definately some tense moments when we could not get the new hard drive to jive up with the backups, after 8 solid hours of screwing around with it, I am right back where I was a few days ago, feels good too.
>
> When you use norton ghost it ghosts the entire drive and restores everything, every little detail, no programs to install, no loss of passwords, all favs in tact, bookmarks, email settings...
www.ibackup.com
Don't remember the exact price but seems like it is $500/yr for 50 gigs of offsite daily backup.
Works with Windows, Windows Small Business Server, and Linux.
> I need to up my game by moving a backup off site, but I don't like the thought of some faceless company having potential access to all my data.
Most, if not all, of the cloud storage providers encrypt your data during upload using a key that you control. You can let the provider manage the key if you want, or you can manage it yourself. In the latter case, the provider has no means of deciphering your data, so your privacy is protected. Of course, if you choose to manage the key and you lose it, you also lose access to your backed-up data.
> Most, if not all, of the cloud storage providers encrypt your data during upload using a key that you control. ...
The thing you can't control is whether the cloud storage provider will exist at the crucial moment. Cloud storage is a great secondary backup system but I wouldn't want to rely on it as a primary.
> The thing you can't control is whether the cloud storage provider will exist at the crucial moment. Cloud storage is a great secondary backup system but I wouldn't want to rely on it as a primary.
I use the Amazon S3 service, and consider it to be my primary backup. I view my local USB drives as secondary.
If my office burns to the ground, the secondary is lost but the regional Amazon data center is probably still in operation. If there's a fire in one part of the regional data center, the mirror(s) are likely still good, plus I'd still have my local backups.
