Backups

[Jarod Wilson]

On Wed, 2009-02-11 at 11:46 -0500, John Boland wrote:
> I've been backing up a few terabytes at home for a couple of years.  I was
> using tape and hp's data protector.  It would have been expensive but I was
> using old equipment from a previous employer.  Back when the total was 2 TB
> it took about 2 days.  Someone here on the list suggested just using a
> second server to hold a copy of the data.  So, I've been doing that for
> about a year now.
> 
> Last fall, I lost my main server.  No problem, I rebuilt it and copied the
> data back from the backup server (which is normally shut off).  All I lost
> was the data since the last backup/copy/rsync.

I've been through similar, with an offsite backup done via BackupPC,
worked a treat for restore, very minimal data loss.


> Jarod,
> 
> I hope the 1.5 seagate's work well for you. I just bought a few of the 1TB
> drives.  The reviews on the 1.5's wasn't very positive.  I'm interested to
> hear how you make out with your drives.

Early reviews sucked, yeah. It was mostly a firmware issue though, which
has since been resolved (my drives all have the updated firmware). These
suckers are FAST. Software RAID5 across 4 of them is actually faster
than the hardware RAID5 on a 3ware card (9550SX) across 8 250G drives
they replaced. But yeah, I hemmed and hawed a bit before just going
ahead and getting them, considered getting a mix of different vendor's
1TB drives, etc. So far, so good though... Not like most of what's on
the array is critical data anyway, its just my multimedia storage, most
of which can be replaced one way or another.

--jarod