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No one here is talking much about tape backups
What's your "backup" solution since RAID is not/should not be one.
Its also a good idea to run MD5SUMS every day/week/month/year (you pick) and make sure your data is recoverable on hard drives/RAIDS/DVD media.
Thanks for the idea, I should schedule this on my tapes at work during periods of inactivity..
Tape is so yesterday. But until recent years it was the most economically way to store a lot of data offsite (you need a manual tape change routine. Using a BIG robot alone isn't enough as some people think). It is still probably the most economically way to store rarely accessed data long term in enterprises, because they don't use cheap 2TB S-ATA drives for storage.
For home users tape has no usage because storage is so cheap for us. Tape is not.
I have experience with LTO-2,3,4 they are great and require no power once you have written to them, they are also more reliable, they also Read Write Verify all data that is written to them (for the LTO technology).
So, "backup solution" means multiple external locations of important data..RAIDed or unRAIDed...
No one here is talking much about tape backups... which I heard was the only real backup solution.
Its also a good idea to run MD5SUMS every day/week/month/year (you pick) and make sure your data is recoverable on hard drives/RAIDS/DVD media.
According to this, the only true "backups" are discs(which can get damaged), offsite(pay subscription) and true tape drives(super expensive).
What's your "backup" solution since RAID is not/should not be one.
I wonder how many off-site/remote date storage companies offer tape backup as opposed to HDD storage arrays.... for consumers.
I wonder how many off-site/remote date storage companies offer tape backup as opposed to HDD storage arrays.... for consumers.
I'd say thats far less than optimal. If all of a sudden you notice your data is corrupt, you have virtually 0 options to recover it. You'd be better off reed-solomon encoding your data if you are worried about that sort of issue.
A single hard drive is not however. It is expected that > 1% of your hard drives will fail each year. At work (where I usually have 200 to 400 drives spinning 24/7/365) over the last 15 years we have a 1% to 7% annual failure rate on drives. And these are not just 5+ year old drives a number of failures were from drives that were less than 2 years old.
I do amateur video work for my kids and their friends. And I'm paranoid...
My working PC has Raid for data integrity/single drive failures.
- Large data raid-6 for performance a simple data protection (8x 2TB Hitachi, raid6, Areca controller)
- System disk is 4xSSD raid 0 for performance.
System disk is ghost-imaged daily to a local, bootable copy on a 500Gb hard drive, fully automated by Norton. I completely expect the raid-0 to fail.
System disk ghost image is made weekly to separate WHS. Just in case I screw something up and need to go backwards. I usually keep the last 6-months or so plus selected older snapshots.
Data array gets "sync" backup daily to WHS server, automated at 3am. I happen to use Goodsync for this but there are litereally dozens of sync products on the marketplace.
Monthly, the same Sync program is used to copy all "new" video files on the WHS to a hard drive. I define "new" as <62 days old. Drive is taken to a storage shed away from home. I'm generating less than 500Gb/Month right now and 500Gb drives are dirt cheap.
Every 3 or 4 months, I copy what I consider "high value" files, mostly my wife's digital photo's, onto a Blu-Ray and store them at the storage unit. I use Blu-Ray because - unlike DVD - the recordable disks do not contain any organic materiel and are considered "archival" quality. Theoretical readable life is 50-100 years (vs 4-5 years for DVD+/-R).
This somewhat paranoid protocol was put together after a raid-controller failure completely wiped a 5x1.5TB raid array that I thought was completely safe. Safe from single drive failures - yes. Safe from completely whacked raid controller that decided to randomly write all over all 5 drives, not so much. Since I've been doing this it has saved my A$$ several times, usually from human error rather than equipment failures (e.g., ah crap, why did I over-write that file).
Do ya'll track these failures? Would be interesting to see that data.
It is an interesting study, but please be careful not to project the conclusions on home users so quickly.google have done recent large scale studies on disk reliability. The papers is available on the internet: http://static.googleusercontent.com.../labs.google.com/en//papers/disk_failures.pdf
It's a recommended read! There are graphs there that shows the failure rates at different ages. About 6% of the disks failed within their first year.
You expect nukes? Honest to goodness nuclear warheads?
It doesn't have to be an extreme such as a terrorist attack but could be something as simple as a broken water line, flooding the server room.
It is an interesting study, but please be careful not to project the conclusions on home users so quickly.
The tests done in a laboratory environment does not simulate a home environment. In particular, what is very wearing in home environments is the expansion and contraction of metal caused by heat variations; rather than a static temperature that always stays the same. The latter is much better for HDDs, who consist of alot of metal and heat up quite rapidly without proper cooling.
Those home users that do cool their (often 7200rpm) HDDs, often do so improperly, by only allowing part of the disks surface to be cooled; creating an imbalance where the HDD has multiple temperature ranges throughout its metal body. I believe this is particularly troublesome for mechanical 3,5" HDDs.
So while this is invaluable if you run a datacenter yourself, not all conclusions have to apply to home users as well; just keep an open mind.
Google may use desktop drives, but they also climate control their DCs. Once the drive is spinning the temperature probably doesn't vary by more than 2-3C between idle and load - and it is that stable for years. The same is not true of your garage.You are aware that the study used the drives in googles production systems, not a lab environment?
Google uses desktop grade harddrives because they have so much redundancy in their system, so this paper is absolutely something that you can interpolate directly to your home environment.
It is not 100% accurate for laptop/desktop users as you say, because they are regularily beeing turned off and on and exposed to more shocks and movement. For the file servers you use at home that actually store your data a 24/7 scenario makes the most sense and that's were this research is interesting.
Google may use desktop drives, but they also climate control their DCs. Once the drive is spinning the temperature probably doesn't vary by more than 2-3C between idle and load - and it is that stable for years. The same is not true of your garage.
Google may use desktop drives, but they also climate control their DCs. Once the drive is spinning the temperature probably doesn't vary by more than 2-3C between idle and load - and it is that stable for years. The same is not true of your garage.
Interestingly, we observe little difference in replace-
ment rates between SCSI, FC and SATA drives, poten-
tially an indication that disk-independent factors, such as
operating conditions, affect replacement rates more than
component specific factors.
AC units go out, PSU fans fail. All of these things happen in a datacenter somewhere, even in Google's.Google may use desktop drives, but they also climate control their DCs. Once the drive is spinning the temperature probably doesn't vary by more than 2-3C between idle and load - and it is that stable for years. The same is not true of your garage.
7200RPM non-server drives are crap for server environments unless they are in a low-usage SAN/NAS. They just don't have good enough seek times to accommodate heavy usage, and SATA sucks for network connectivity.
That's great for google, but for other companies and organizations, I would rather have reliable SAS 15K HDDs with RAID 5/6, off-site backup, and incremental tape backups.
7200RPM non-server drives are crap for server environments unless they are in a low-usage SAN/NAS. They just don't have good enough seek times to accommodate heavy usage, and SATA sucks for network connectivity.
You do realize the contradiction in your statements here, right? "That's good for Google"..."they don't have good enough seek time...heavy usage...SATA sucks...". Right. They're good enough for the largest data aggregator in the world with the biggest and most heavily accessed databases ever created...but they are only good enough for low-usage SAN/NAS. Comical.
ZFS works fine with SATA?
It's not that SATA is bad as a whole, but it is not nearly as robust as SAS nor does it have the hardware features of it.
I'm using SATA in my server right now (sig), but I'm not doing anything majorly intensive either, nor is it a many-user environment.
SAS has a much higher reliability and throughput than SATA since it is full-duplex, thus it can handle large loads of traffic simultaneously without being bottle necked or having any wait time.
Seriously, the only SATA drives I would use in a mid-high traffic instance would be in a SAN, and the HDD would have to be enterprise-class drives, no desktop drives allowed.
The servers however would have SAS, whether they be 7200 or 15K RPM drives depends on the load the servers would have.
If you have enough of them, I suppose that's fine, but for high-usage situations within a firm, they absolutely will not do.
SATA is only half-duplex and is unreliable in high-usage environments.
As was stated, google uses a ton of them, so if one goes down, another can kick in.
Companies don't work this way and normally won't have hundreds/thousands of SATA drives, rather, a few good SAS drives for high reliability.
If you want to use SATA drives for a company's RAID array, then good luck.
Those drives were meant for single-user environments, and in a pinch, can be used for for a small server.
They were never intended for heavy usage such as databases, accounting, video streaming, etc. in a many-user environment.
...and yeah, SATA does suck complete ass compared to SAS, and any IT admin worth his salt would know that.
Very comical, yeah, this coming from the "paranoid" guy who buys a new 500GB HDD every month.