Re: Somewhat OT: Large backups

[Bruno Prior <bruno@xxxxxxx>]

Me too, although I'm using a combination of RAID-1 and RAID-5 and 4 40Gb disks at the moment. I've been using linux software-RAID for around 6
years, and it's never let me down (I don't count the reconf problems as letting me down, as it's a pretty complex thing to do, and I knew the
risks).

Interesting that you say RAID-1 slows down performance. Presumably you
mean relative to RAID-0? If your system is working properly, the RAID
software or hardware should be able to treat the RAID-1 effectively as a striped system for reads, which should give you near RAID-0 performance (unless the disks are IDE and they are both on the same channel). As
long as you haven't made this mistake, and your hardware or software is reasonably intelligent, the general rule for RAID-1 should be writes
marginally slower than a single disk (as you have to write to both, but they can be carried out in parallel), and reads nearly double the speed of a single disk (if your machine is smart enough to treat the mirrors
as stripes). Perhaps you should check your configuration.

Anyway, as far as the original question goes, this is a slight detour,
as RAID is not a substitute for backups. RAID will not protect you from data loss due to fire, theft, flood, lightning or other surges,
filesystem corruption, accidental deletion, viruses, hacking etc. RAID-1 and -5 are simply to allow your machine to carry on functioning in the
event of a hard-disk failure. RAID-0, of course, is simply for speed and provides no redundancy at all.

Cheers,

Bruno

Gerard McGovern wrote:
>>Apparently some people on this list have 100s Gbs of MP3s
>>etc. If you are one of them, what do you use for backing up?
>
>
> I run a RAID 1 config with two 120 GB IBM drives. Slows down performan= ce
> slightly but as they are MP3s it really doesn't matter.
>
> Total cost =A3240 from dabs.com ... plus of the course the RAID contro= ller
> but you could take your life into your own hands and use the Microsoft=
> RAID solution.
>
> G

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