On 28 December 2011 11:34, Gordon Scott <gordon@???> wrote:
> That depends upon the RAID level. Raid zero offers no redundancy
> whatsoever, It's sole purpose is to increase throughput.
>
> Raid one is disc-for-disc mirroring, so offers 100% redundancy and it
> therefore a data backup, though of course it also backs up things like
> accidental deletions.
>
> Higher levels generally offer a bit of each with different trade-offs.
Don't confuse data redundancy with data backup... redundancy generally only
protects against hardware failure (and help stop downtime with it dose),
backups
should (ideally) protect against almost everything (but generally take
longer to
restore).
The true backup system is historic (so you can recover changes made weeks
ago
as you dont always notice data loss immendently) and issolated (preferably
off
site to protect agienst the envrioment, such as theft or fire).
RAID does nether of these.
But back to the orignal question...
My media server is just an old desktop fitted with 4 1TB hard drives in a
RAID5 array that offers media over the network via a samba share. I
strongly
advise using some sort of RAID and it can save hours or even weeks of
trouble
if a drive fails, especially for such large data stores... just don't relay
on it as a
full backup system.
This setup also lets my run other services off my server such as a simple
website, media servers for streaming media to devices such as a playstation3
and anything else I can think of.
As for actual backups I tend to sync my most important data to a service
like
dropbox and then just not worry at all about losing it :). For less
important
data or larger data that cannot be recreated (such as my git repos) I
regularly
back them up to an external hard drive which I tend to carry around with me
(as
off-site as I can keep it) and everything else (generally the large media) I
dont backup as I dont have the sapce or money to do so (and I can recover
it if
I do lose it, it will just take a long time and dosnt really matter if
I don't
get it all back).
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