3 ms·

A quick word of caution: RAID is not a backup (as already mentioned elsewhere in the comments). Even more so in home solutions whether they are DIY or off the s

A quick word of caution: RAID is not a backup (as already mentioned elsewhere in the comments). Even more so in home solutions whether they are DIY or off the shelf. Why? Because storing a single copy of your data on a single local RAID array doesn't protect you from disasters such as fire, theft, accidental fluid spills, small children/pets, a power surge after a lightning strike, flooding, and so on. Basically, a lot of the stuff you'd fine in your home insurance policy. RAID doesn't guarantee data integrity either. You lost data after an unintended deletion or corruption by some computer program? RAID won't help you get your data back any more then a single disk scenario would. If the original file got overwritten and mirrored across the array, and all you had was that one copy, you won't be able to go back to that original. A more exceptional scenario would be a drive silently failing and RAID happily mirroring corrupted data across the entire array. Unless you use a filesystem that implements checksums - like ZFS - you wouldn't notice this unless it was too late. [1] [1] https://superuser.com/questions/112683/does-raid-1-protect-against-corruption https://superuser.com/questions/112683/does-raid-1-protect-a... I'm not advising against RAID. I think there's merit in using RAID when it comes to convenience and availability. Like, your data remaining available when you experience a sudden disk failure, and not having to spend hours or days getting everything back on line again. I'd say that RAID and backups are complementary. So, what about backups then? The 3-2-1 backup strategy is a good start: 3 copies, 2 local, 1 physically remote. That could be as simple as copying your drives every week to a separate HD or SSD drive, and every month to another separate drive which is safely stored outside of your home, i.e. a family member, friend, or at the bank. You could step it up a notch and choose to rsync your data across two connected drives, while rsync a third copy to specialized cloud storage service such as Borgbackup or Wasabi. Add in scripts that perform regular checksums control and reports the results daily and you've got a pretty solid solution. The final step is looking at your data and differentiating between the stuff you absolutely can't afford to lose (e.g. family albums) and the stuff you may afford to lose (e.g. software downloads). The goal here is to calculate the costs associated with required storage volume and bandwidth, and land on an appropriate backup solution that matches your budget and your needs. Finally, that's just safeguarding your data in the present and short term future. Neither RAID or backups are a long term preservation strategy. Which is a whole other can of worms, including such challenges as migrating obsolete data formats (Yeah, I have WordPerfect 5 and AutoCAD files in my own personal archive), or dealing with obsolete hardware I/O (Yeah, I have a bunch of old IDE drives in a cardboard box for which I had to buy an I/O converter).

bluGill 6y ago
I run ZFS to mitigate half of what you say. I trust ZFS more than backups to keep my data correct - checksums ensure against bitrot. I also have snapshots, so unless I don't notice the file is gone for years it is there to restore easily. What you say about protection from fire/theft is still real though. I'm looking for a good (which includes easy) solution for that.
wvh 6y ago
I think the complexity of RAID might even itself be the reason of data loss in quite a few cases. Of course in a corporate environment with whole racks full of disks it makes sense, but at home I just rather synchronise single disks. Make/buy a NAS with two disks for media files, use one as master and copy the changes from one to the other at midnight or whatever frequency makes most sense. It gives you a chance to undo stupid command line mistakes, and you don't need to have similar models of disk. Then keep an external eSATA/USB disk to backup the main disk once a week/month. When I was younger, all these experiments with firewalls, routers, vlans, RAID and other more professional technologies were a good learning experience, but after all those years, I rather keep work at work and keep it simple at home rather than to simulate a corporate environment on a shoestring budget.

bluGill 6y ago

I run ZFS to mitigate half of what you say. I trust ZFS more than backups to keep my data correct - checksums ensure against bitrot. I also have snapshots, so unless I don't notice the file is gone for years it is there to restore easily. What you say about protection from fire/theft is still real though. I'm looking for a good (which includes easy) solution for that.

wvh 6y ago

I think the complexity of RAID might even itself be the reason of data loss in quite a few cases. Of course in a corporate environment with whole racks full of disks it makes sense, but at home I just rather synchronise single disks. Make/buy a NAS with two disks for media files, use one as master and copy the changes from one to the other at midnight or whatever frequency makes most sense. It gives you a chance to undo stupid command line mistakes, and you don't need to have similar models of disk. Then keep an external eSATA/USB disk to backup the main disk once a week/month. When I was younger, all these experiments with firewalls, routers, vlans, RAID and other more professional technologies were a good learning experience, but after all those years, I rather keep work at work and keep it simple at home rather than to simulate a corporate environment on a shoestring budget.