Raid 5 versus 3 computer backup

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Doug wrote:
| There was a good article on storage cited by slashdot here:
|
|     http://storagemojo.com/?p=383
|
| The end of the article made this conclusion:
|
| >Further, these results validate the Google File System's central
| redundancy concept: forget RAID, just replicate the data three times.
| If I'm an IT architect, the idea that I can spend less money and get
| higher reliability from simple cluster storage file replication should
| be very attractive.
|
| Based on this, I will rsync my data to a third box in the house, and
| rsync once a week. Any others use the 3 machine idea?

Yeah; I've been doing that for some years now. I keep thinking that I
should  get  more proficient with RAID and set up a RAID1 array.  But
duplicating your personal files on a couple of different machines  is
much  easier,  and  has  another  use:  I  test software on all three
machines, as a basic portability test.

Part of the fun in my case is that one of the three is an OSX system,
which  has  a  case-insensitive file system.  This was a huge pain at
first, but I'd had a few people try to use some of my stuff  on  OSX,
and  they  failed.   So  I  went through the pain of hunting down and
dealing with the problems.  I'd actually rather hunt down  and  shoot
the  idiots  who  decided  to  inflict such a file system on the unix
world, but that wouldn't be very legal, I suppose.

I also have a backup on a disk that isn't plugged into  anything,  to
protect against lightning strikes and such.  I don't think I'll worry
about an asteroid impact right now, though.  Maybe next decade.

I really should learn how to do RAID right, though ...




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