what are the good & bad points with backup system (Raid)

[M Brown]

i’d just get an external hard drive. i just bought one to do my back ups on, 320gigs for £100

[Alan Drury]

Are you refering to the Belkin hardrive case, you fit your own hard drives (2) and it goes onto a network, about £80.00 + drives, if so I have one and although I can’t speak for its RAID capabilities I have plugged it into the wireless router I use for the network and it works very well. Obviously my wireless connection is slower than wired but users do have a central drive, the drives can be split up and have password protection, I can’t fault it – it suits me. Speed issue not relevant if you plug into a wired hub.
Alan D

[Martin Pearson]

Dave the simple answer is yes there are other ways to do it that are more cost effective but with some of them Raid set-ups can be difficult to configure.
I have a Friend that knows a lot about this sort of thing so I will email him and ask for the best way to do it.

Not making any promises but hopefully will be able to give you a better answer fairly quickly.

[Dave Bruce]

I looked at the Netgear sc101 initially (about £80) and you add your own drives, but there was poor reviews about it (possible because it has no cooling fan and I suppose if you install cheap drives they could fail with overheating).
The Buffalo seems more robust and includes the drives (4 off).

Cheers

Dave

[Dave Bruce]

Thanks Martin, that’s the benefit of buying the Buffalo it is already set up to use RAID so no messing about, but I am sure If you know what you are doing, setting up a couple of usb hard drives of the main computer is probably easy, but then I am not sure the network will see them as well.

Look forward to hearing your friends solution.

Cheers

Dave

[Alan Drury]

Sorry Dave I meant Netgear not Belkin, mine is on 24/7 and the case doen’t get particularly warm let alone hot, obviously time will tell but no problems in the first 3 months. Advantage with this is that you put your own drives in of any size and replace with bigger if necessary, set up is easy and straight forward, simple yes or no for RAID configuration.
Alan D

[David Rowland]

Well i have dabbled a fair bit… so firstly the Netgear SC101, one under my desk as we speak and very close to being thrown in the bin… slow transfer rate and has major connectivity issues, if you did have a disaster the chances of re-mounting the drive are minimal and Netgear don’t give a monkeys so it seems.

I also bought a small external unit, but I now have different plans for it as it will only format to FAT32 which means a file size limit of 4GB and our email outlooks/exchange file must be about 12GB in size, so I think i ditch it to some other plan.

RAID itself is designed as a fail-safe mechanism, we are running RAID 1 as a boot drive and RAID 5 as a data drive to reach 1TB and I used to have a RAID 10 solution between 4 drives. The biggest problem with RAID is fire redundancy, you basically leave your drives in the server forever or until a problem occurs, you cannot rely on removing the drives and taking them home, so the RAID as a backup is not effective, even extending a partition over drives is not a good idea, you need to keep drives just basic and independent of any special RAID things for backup reasons.

I think i have seen the buffalow, cant be sure but if its a networkable and a single drive system then it be fine.

[Phil Barnfield]

Agreed with you there Dave, RAID is not a very good solution at all.

If you have a fireproof safe nearby, use a basic USB 2.0 External Drive (SATA preferable as its faster still) and place the drive enclosure in the safe. Job done.

Better still, get a DAT DDS Drive (tape drive) and use them. Have a set of 6. 5 for every day of the week, and one which is used as an off-site backup which needs to be created say every week or other week and taken off site and left somewhere secure. This way if your unit ever burns down, you still have the data sat at home on a 40GB tape or something.

Either way will work well, but raid is only really a fail safe in case your primary hard drive decides to stop working, and the mirrored drive then takes over. Not useful for theft or fire – which to be fair is the more common problem with data loss.

HTH

[Phil Barnfield]

quote DaveBruce:

Thanks Martin, that’s the benefit of buying the Buffalo it is already set up to use RAID so no messing about, but I am sure If you know what you are doing, setting up a couple of usb hard drives of the main computer is probably easy, but then I am not sure the network will see them as well.

Look forward to hearing your friends solution.

Cheers

Dave

Forgot to reply to this part. You obviously have at least a basic Workgroup setup (or Domain network), so simply create a root share of the external hard drive if it is required.

If you need to backup data from a different pc, again create a share on the data that needs to be backed up, and then map the share as a network drive, and then your PC with the ext drive will see it as say drive letter Z: and you can then backup the necessary files.

If you run XP Pro you will have MS Backup Utility installed, which will allow you to do all this with ease, including scheduling backups. If your running XP Home, do a search on the internet for "backup.msi" and this will allow you to install MS Backup on your PC.

Any techie questions, please fire away – it’s my other day job! 😛

[Peter Normington]

I have a maxtor one touch it sits there and does the job (I think) but not had to restore anything yet, and dont want to try it unless I have too!

http://www.maxtorsolutions.com/en/catal … eWire_USB/

peter

[David Rowland]

Yeah, maxtor one touch is a good deal, I have seen them too.

Nice to know im not the only Windows tech around here Phil :wink:. We are on SBS2003 Premium with 15cal, our backup is handled by CA Brightstor, I tell you I wish I never bought that kit, powerful it is but cant compete with DDS solutions, although they are a tad expensive.

[Phil Barnfield]

quote Dave Rowland:

Nice to know im not the only Windows tech around here Phil :wink:.

I always find there is someone else just around the corner! Just about to complete my CCNA then I can get a "proper" job…… hehe

[David Rowland]

very good… i never found time to do exams… although i would like an MCSE or more of the programming ones, but sign making is what im doing now as I dont really want to learn Vista and anything new. Not touched Cisco products apart from Linksys modems, sometimes the techy M$ stuff does your headin

[Dave Bruce]

quote Peter Normington:

I have a maxtor one touch it sits there and does the job (I think) but not had to restore anything yet, and dont want to try it unless I have too!

Thanks Peter that looks like a simple cheaper solution

Dave

[Stephen Morriss]

I now use a Buffalo Linkstation pro.
These use the Terastation software but with a 250gb sata drive and a Gbit network in a smaller box, It’s just slightly bigger than the external drive next to it.
Then I’ve got a Buffalo 250gb usb 2 external drive on it, this is used as a backup for the Linkstation.

Works very well so far, I think the Linkstation is based on Linux but the web login is fine and seems clear enough.

I like having my file server in a different building and with the external drive hopefully if the main drive goes then I can just plug the external drive into one of the other computers to access the info as it’s just a mirrored backup.

That and the regular backups onto DVD will hopefully stop us loosing too much info.

Steve

[peterarendt]

Hi All,

Bit late on this post but I have tried a lot of RAID systems including the Terastations etc.
The best mid range one that I can recommend is the ReadyNAS NV from infrant.
You can get it without any hard drives and simply add your own.
Unlike the Terastation the OS is not stored on the drives but on a flash card so you can replace the drives yourself without any problems.
Performance is much better than the Terastation as well.
It has also has a very active user community and regular flash upgrades etc.
Full Thumbs up for this product!

Peter

[Adam McGuire]

Just a word from my IT support head…..RAID 5 is the most effective form of RAID. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Raid 5 allows drives to be connected together to produce one large disk, the total size being 1 drive less than the combined total of all the drives. This means that for e.g. 4 x 250gb drives you end up with 750gb usable space. If one disk was to fail, you simply replace it and it re-builds.

Raid 5, in simple terms, writes your files across all the disks in the Raid set, and on the last disk, it writes a checksum. The checksum disk is cycled through the disks in sequence. (if it starts on disk 1, the next checksum is on disk 2 etc) This all means that should a drive fail, the system rebuilds itself. On any single file, if the checksum is missing, the data is on the other 3 drives (in a 4 disk raidset) and so the system recalculates the checksum and saves it to the new disk. If, on another file in the same system, 2 portions and the checksum exist, these three are combined to produce the missing data.

Even while a disk has failed or the system is rebuilding a new disk, the data is still available for use….albeit a little slower. In the rare occurrence of 2 failed disks in a raid 5 set, the data is effectively lost. Raid 50….is merely 2 x Raid 5 sets mirroring each other.

Anyway, I’d go with a Raid 5 set any day, especially with customer work, simply because of the fail safe extra drive. Portable disks are good, but easily dropped. Hard drives don’t like being dropped and corruption can easily occur.

I currently use a DAT drive and an Ultrium drive (both tape based) because they’re relatively inexpensive, and 1 tape per day which goes off site the following morning. All I ever am behind if data is lost is 1 day.

Sorry if that’s a little boring, but it’s the IT industry standard and most effective guard against data loss.

Adam