RAID vs Scheduled Back-ups w/ External Hard Drive

[davephan]

Originally Posted by tchapin

Hi Dave,

I'm interested not necessarily in imaging a drive, but cloning it. If my system drive fails, I'd like to be able to take the spare drive that I've been cloning the system drive on to and replacing the dead drive in my system with it.

Does Ghost do that?

Acronis doesn't. It takes images, but they are in a proprietary Acronis format. I use their True Image product at work. To restore, you need to boot into a special mode and restore the image onto the new drive. So, effectively, you'd need three drives 1) the original 2) the one holding the image and 3) the replacement.

I'd like to be able to combine 2 and 3.

Thanks.

Todd

You could clone drives with the software that comes with replacement drives. So, it would not cost anything.

I think it is more practical to limit the contents of your C drive as much as possible, just installing the operating system and programs, not storing video files or anything sizeable. Then the image files will be smaller.

The image could be one file or many files. The file sizes can be selected betwen very small and about 2 gigs per file. The image file segments can be used to restore a hard drive. The newer imaging products also allow you to 'mount' the image in a VM environment.

If you use imaging, you can take more frequent images than if you did disk cloning. You can take full, differential, and incremental images. For example you could take a full image once a month. Then each day take a incremental image. You then can recover to any day of the month with the collection of image files.

You could recover to a second hard drive to test your recovery process without effecting your production C drive.

I don't think there is any advantages copying the whole drive onto a second drive verses using disk imaging software, other than saving the cost of the disk imaging software. If cost is a problem, you could use PING for imaging, which is free imaging software, but not as flexible as Ghost, Acronis, or the other commericial imaging software.

Dave

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Peter_h

I can attest to this. I had this exact scenario happen with my WHS recently.

RAID 1 on the OS, a nice power flicker, data corruption and an OS that wouldn't boot past the windows is loading screen.

Have a UPS?

[Peter_h]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Have a UPS?

Didn't at the time. I know, I know. I do now.

[Greg]

Originally Posted by stanger89

What are you actually trying to do? Is it a full system disaster recovery plan, or is it just trying to have some level of "insurance" against re-ripping digital (but recoverable) media?

I'm not sure what a full system disaster recovery plan entails?

I guess I want to prevent re-ripping. Sure, I'll have the original physical disks, which is a back-up, but it would be a lot of work to re-rip all of that stuff. As far as recorded shows go............oh well...........if it's lost it's lost.

Of course I want to protect the system files, which probably should be on a separate hard drive than the media files. Imaging sounds like a good idea.

Could you explain the differences between imaging, cloning, mirroring or just copying the entire drive to a back-up drive?

I did a little research and a RAID 5 with 4 drives (equal size) was recommended. Would the system files be on one of these drives or on a separate drive (5th drive)? And would these drives fit into a standard case or would I need a RAID cage?

Thank you,
Greg

[davephan]

Originally Posted by Greg

I'm not sure what a full system disaster recovery plan entails?

I guess I want to prevent re-ripping. Sure, I'll have the original physical disks, which is a back-up, but it would be a lot of work to re-rip all of that stuff. As far as recorded shows go............oh well...........if it's lost it's lost.

Of course I want to protect the system files, which probably should be on a separate hard drive than the media files. Imaging sounds like a good idea.

Could you explain the differences between imaging, cloning, mirroring or just copying the entire drive to a back-up drive?

I did a little research and a RAID 5 with 4 drives (equal size) was recommended. Would the system files be on one of these drives or on a separate drive (5th drive)? And would these drives fit into a standard case or would I need a RAID cage?

Thank you,
Greg

The disaster recovey plan lays out what you are going to do to recover the computer if it fails, in advance of the failure. The failure could be caused by any number of problems. The system may be unbootable, you could have a driver problem that can't seem to be fixed, tuners might not be possible to reconfigure - even when deleting and re-adding them, or you could even have the new Windows black screen of death. For all these, imaging will work to get back to a point in time in the past before the problems occurred.

The imaging will recover your operating system, programs, drivers, tuner functionality, and thousands of configuration changes. Keep the used disk space to a minimum on your boot drive with just the operating system, programs, and smaller files. All the larger files should be stored on other drives. This will keep the image file set smaller. You will then be able to store several generations of images on other drives.

Critical video files, such as DVD rips and higher valued videos should be backed up to a separate USB hard drive that is normally not connected to your computer system. RAID can protect files, but RAID can fail from time to time. If you work with enough computer systems, you will see RAID fail, I have a number of times. That is why you cannot use only one method to recover everything. Image recoveries can fail, but I haven't seen that in many years. If your system board fails, an identical backup board would be very nice to have on hand. You would need to purchase two system boards together or in a short time span since the same system board could become unavailable in a relatively short time period. It is possible to recover an image to a different system board, which I have done when the system board had the same chipset. It's much better if you have a spare system board that you know is good.

The image files need to be stored on a hard drive and a separate USB hard drive that is not normally connected to the computer. Do not use optical disks to store the image files, if you do, your recoveries might fail.

I would either have the operating system disk on a separate drive without RAID or a separate RAID controller from the video file storage controller. The operating system drive can easily be recovered with an image, so you really can get by without RAID for that drive.

If you don't use RAID for the video storage, you can copy the video library files that you really don't want to loose to another drive. Losing some video files probably won't matter if you don't care about those video files that much.

Most important, you need to test your recovery plan. You can do that by replacing your operating system drive with a spare drive. Then apply the image to that drive. When you recover the system during the testing, you will have confidence that you can recover the system and you will know how long it will take.

Dave

[rtengvad]

Originally Posted by tchapin

I'm interested not necessarily in imaging a drive, but cloning it. If my system drive fails, I'd like to be able to take the spare drive that I've been cloning the system drive on to and replacing the dead drive in my system with it.

Does Ghost do that?

Acronis doesn't.

Actually Acronis True Image Home 2009 does cloning

Rasmus

[tchapin]

Really? That's great. I'll poke around a bit more.

Thanks.

Todd

[davephan]

Ghost might do drive cloning too. I would have to check the next time I am at home and can boot up to the Ghost recovery CD. There are many programs that can do disk programs. The programs are frequently included for free with new drives.

Cloning disks is a method to recover the computer, especially if you install a drive tray, so you can swap drives without opening up your computer case. The downside to that method is you probably will not clone the drive very often, so you will go back in time many months, instead of a shorter time period.

It's all a trade off. You want to go back far enough before the failure happened, but you don't want to go back too far. I doubt if anyone documents all the changes they make to their system, after each image. So, you'll have to remember the changes you made, stumble across other changes, and loose some of the changes.

I don't know what the argument is against imaging verses using a cloned disk. It takes about 30 minutes of downtime to recover from an image. The downtime could be reduced if you used solid state drives, which probably recover much quicker.


Dave

[brainbone]

Originally Posted by Greg

I'm not sure what a full system disaster recovery plan entails?

I guess I want to prevent re-ripping. Sure, I'll have the original physical disks, which is a back-up, but it would be a lot of work to re-rip all of that stuff. As far as recorded shows go............oh well...........if it's lost it's lost.

Of course I want to protect the system files, which probably should be on a separate hard drive than the media files. Imaging sounds like a good idea.

For my use, I settled on an unraid server for long-term (dvds, music, etc.) storage.

In the case of unraid, if I lose more than the 1 drive the parity protected array allows me to lose, the worst case is that I lose the data ONLY on the drive(s) lost. This means less re-ripping to recover from a multi-disk failure. Unraid also lets me keep adding drives, of any size, to expand. In addition, unraid can keep disks spun down, if the data on them is not needed. Only the disks needed are spun up (different from most other raid arrays, where all drives in the array need to be spinning).

I keep a separate smaller drive in the SageTV server for recorded shows, and then archive the older recorded shows to the unraid server. I also use R-Drive Image to create weekly (and in some cases nightly incremental) drive images of some of my more important PCs, backing up to the unraid server.

[Taddeusz]

I've decided that once I fall into some money I'm going to get a Drobo or possibly a Drobo S. A DroboPro would would be nice but I don't see that happening. As long as drive capacities keep getting larger a 4 or 5 drive Drobo should be plenty for my family's needs.

[davephan]

Originally Posted by brainbone

For my use, I settled on an unraid server for long-term (dvds, music, etc.) storage.

In the case of unraid, if I lose more than the 1 drive the parity protected array allows me to lose, the worst case is that I lose the data ONLY on the drive(s) lost. This means less re-ripping to recover from a multi-disk failure. Unraid also lets me keep adding drives, of any size, to expand. In addition, unraid can keep disks spun down, if the data on them is not needed. Only the disks needed are spun up (different from most other raid arrays, where all drives in the array need to be spinning).

I keep a separate smaller drive in the SageTV server for recorded shows, and then archive the older recorded shows to the unraid server. I also use R-Drive Image to create weekly (and in some cases nightly incremental) drive images of some of my more important PCs, backing up to the unraid server.

I looked at Unraid about a year ago, but never tried it. How do you like UnRAID and which version did you get? How long have you been using it? Have you compare it to WHS for a file server? Does it handle 1.5 TB hard drives?

I am protecting all my 'critical' video files, including rips on a separate USB hard drive. A storage sysem like Unraid or WHS might be a good solution to give some file protection to the not so 'critical' video files.

Dave

[brainbone]

Originally Posted by davephan

I looked at Unraid about a year ago, but never tried it. How do you like UnRAID and which version did you get? How long have you been using it? Have you compare it to WHS for a file server? Does it handle 1.5 TB hard drives?

I am protecting all my 'critical' video files, including rips on a separate USB hard drive. A storage sysem like Unraid or WHS might be a good solution to give some file protection to the not so 'critical' video files.

Dave

I'm currently using the latest beta, 4.5-beta12, and its working well. Been using unraid for about 2 years now with no real issues, other than some performance issues (couldn't use the spin down feature without having the later spin-up of a spun down drive causing streams from already spinning drives to lag) that were finally resolved in the latest beta.

Supports just about any drive your controller and linux will support, so yes, 1.5TB drives are supported. If you build your own server, the unraid community is very good at helping you find compatible hardware (most hardware works), and getting it all running if you have any issues.

I've had 1 drive fail (an older 250GB one I probably shouldn't have put back into use anyway). Rebuilt the array and didn't lose any data.

You always need more space than you anticipate, and larger, cheaper, drives are always around the corner. I started with three drives (3 x 500GB), and currently have 8 (the original 3 500GB, 2 additional 1TB, 1 x 250GB, 2 x 320GB). I have an additional SATA controller and 2 x 1.5TB drives on order.

[Greg]

Dave,

Thanks for the very detailed explanations. Are you currently using RAID?

To me, at this point, imaging would take the highest priority due to the critical system files and multitude of SageTV configuration settings. Performing a periodic back-up of the video files to an external USB drive would prevent a lot of re-ripping in case of a drive failure.

- If I decided not to use RAID how would I employ multiple hard drives? Could I tell SageTV to send my TV recordings to drive A, my music to drive B, my DVD/Blue Ray rips to drive C, etc.?

- Is there a way to make all the drives appear as one drive like it looks like in RAID.

- What's the downside of using one large drive, other than a single drive failure destroys everything? Is it too slow?

One thing that I don't like about RAID is that all the drives spin at the same time wasting power.

Brainbone,

Thanks for introducing me to unRAID. I'll need to research that some more.


The big question: to RAID, or not to RAID or to unRAID?

Thanks,
Greg

[CollinR]

I image my OS and apps partitions to DVD and put them in my safe deposit box.

The music and wiz.bin I replicate to all HDDs on my LAN, the photos I replicate and backup to DVD with OS and apps.

The recorded TV I don't do jack for, if a drive fails it fails I don't have the kinda $ it takes to really keep up that much data. Even BluRay it would be insane. I'm not stupid though I didn't do JBOD or RAID0 just asking to get wiped out. Also several disks can spread the load if you manually balance them (free space same) up front.

I too use Arconis products, works well. Also partitioning off the apps I like much too. Not to mention SageTV's thumbnails puts me over the DVD limit.

[davephan]

Originally Posted by CollinR

I image my OS and apps partitions to DVD and put them in my safe deposit box.

The music and wiz.bin I replicate to all HDDs on my LAN, the photos I replicate and backup to DVD with OS and apps.

The recorded TV I don't do jack for, if a drive fails it fails I don't have the kinda $ it takes to really keep up that much data. Even BluRay it would be insane. I'm not stupid though I didn't do JBOD or RAID0 just asking to get wiped out. Also several disks can spread the load if you manually balance them (free space same) up front.

I too use Arconis products, works well. Also partitioning off the apps I like much too. Not to mention SageTV's thumbnails puts me over the DVD limit.

Be careful! I used to image to DVDs and I had a failed recovery using images on DVDs, even with three separate DVD copy sets! The image was a couple years old, and could not be recovered using that image.

You can improve the odds with DVDs by using fairly small image segments. Then it is much less likely that the same physical location in two different image DVD copies will be bad, verses having very large image segments on the DVD.

It is much safer to image to a USB hard drive. Optical media is just too unreliable to trust with image files.

I don't use RAID. I only use imaging of my C drive and copying my critical video files and all my rips. I copy to another drive on the computer and a separate, normally detached USB hard drive.

I am thinking of building up a separate WHS server just for video storage after I rebuild my SageTV server. The SageTV server has a dual core, and I want a quad core instead with the same 3.0 gig clock speed, without overclocking the CPU.

Dave