Backup system

aethelwulf

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Nov 20, 2007
Messages
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I'm looking to get an external backup system, but I don't have much experience with external hard drives or RAID. I'm looking for something that will protect my data well (eg. RAID 1), and I want at least 1TB of total space. Is my best bet to get an external enclosure with 2+ drives? What enclosures would you recommend? Also I'm not sure if it would be better to go with RAID 1,5,6 etc. as I'm not really clear on all the advantages of each.

Thanks in advance for your help!
 
I messed around with RAID using my on board ICH9R controller and I wasn't really happy with the results. It was particularly frustrating how easy the volume would become corrupted and need to be rebuilt.

I thought about spending $150 on an external 4 drive eSATA enclosure. Or a hardware RAID card and trying to squeeze more drives inside my case. But I wanted a cheaper option.

What I ended up doing was using an external drive dock ($24 for the iStar eSATA drive dock at directron.com). And I run a script that makes an exact copy of my internal hard drives to the external docked drive.

I have 4 internal hard drives, so I have 4 external hard drives of equal size. Then I use robocopy (free, included in Vista or downloadable from Windows 2003 resource kit to use with Windows XP) to do the backup. Robocopy copies anything new or modified to the backup drive and removes anything from the backup drive that is no longer on the internal drive. So that both drives remain identical.

Each of the 4 external drives I give a different drive letter. This prevents my script from accidently copying to the wrong drive.

Example. Internal drives are G, H, J, K. And my external drives are V, W, Y, Z.
G backs up to V
H backs up to W
J backs up to Y
K backs up to Z

Then this is the batch file I use to perform the backups:



/F "TOKENS=1* DELIMS= " %%A IN ('DATE/T') DO SET CDATE=%%B
FOR /F "TOKENS=1,2 eol=/ DELIMS=/ " %%A IN ('DATE/T') DO SET mm=%%B
FOR /F "TOKENS=1,2 DELIMS=/ eol=/" %%A IN ('echo %CDATE%') DO SET dd=%%B
FOR /F "TOKENS=2,3 DELIMS=/ " %%A IN ('echo %CDATE%') DO SET yyyy=%%B
SET date=%yyyy%%mm%%dd%

md "g:\backup_system\%date%"
robocopy g:\ v:\ /mir /log+:"g:\backup_system\%date%\games.log" /ndl /np /tee /xd g:\recycler /xd "g:\system volume information" /xd "g:\$RECYCLE.BIN" /r:0 /w:0
robocopy g:\ v:\ /mir /log+:"g:\backup_system\%date%\games.log" /ndl /np /tee /xd g:\recycler /xd "g:\system volume information" /xd "g:\$RECYCLE.BIN" /r:0 /w:0

robocopy h:\ w:\ /mir /log+:"g:\backup_system\%date%\apps.log" /ndl /np /tee /xd h:\recycler /xd "h:\system volume information" /xd "h:\$RECYCLE.BIN" /r:0 /w:0
robocopy h:\ w:\ /mir /log+:"g:\backup_system\%date%\apps.log" /ndl /np /tee /xd h:\recycler /xd "h:\system volume information" /xd "h:\$RECYCLE.BIN" /r:0 /w:0

robocopy j:\ y:\ /mir /log+:"g:\backup_system\%date%\jasper.log" /ndl /np /tee /xd j:\recycler /xd "j:\system volume information" /xd "j:\$RECYCLE.BIN" /r:0 /w:0
robocopy j:\ y:\ /mir /log+:"g:\backup_system\%date%\jasper.log" /ndl /np /tee /xd j:\recycler /xd "j:\system volume information" /xd "j:\$RECYCLE.BIN" /r:0 /w:0

robocopy k:\ z:\ /mir /log+:"g:\backup_system\%date%\kasper.log" /ndl /np /tee /xd k:\recycler /xd "k:\system volume information" /xd "k:\$RECYCLE.BIN" /r:0 /w:0
robocopy k:\ z:\ /mir /log+:"g:\backup_system\%date%\kasper.log" /ndl /np /tee /xd k:\recycler /xd "k:\system volume information" /xd "k:\$RECYCLE.BIN" /r:0 /w:0



The first part is mostly for organizing my log files. It helps set the date format correctly, so everytime the script is run it makes a new sub folder with the current date, begining with year month and day. And puts the log file into that folder. That way if I need to go back and see what happened on a certain day, it's easy to find.

This script tries to backup all the drives. However with the drive dock, I only have one drive plugged in at a time. The script will simply error out when it finds a destination drive that doesn't exist, then move on to the next one until it finds the extral drive that is plugged in and backups up the correct drive associated with it. That way I can just use one script instead of four different scripts for the four drives.

Each day I'll put in a different drive and do the backup and run the script. Since it only needs to copy/remove files that were modified since the last backup it usually doesn't take too long. And at worst I'll have a backup that is 4 days old. Though I'll sometimes do all four, swapping out the drives and re-running the script. Since it doesn't take too long.

And what I like about this over RAID. One, I don't have to keep 8 hard drives powered on all the time.
If I accidently screw up something on my internal drives, the mistake isn't replicated to the backup drive if I catch it before my backup.
If my computer crashes and reboots, I don't have to worry about reinitializing a RAID volume.
And if my house catches on fire, it'll be easy for me to grab my 4 external drives and run out the door, rather than lug my 50 pound Cosmos case through an inferno.
 
While that is a nice solution, it isn't exactly what I was looking for. I want the external backup solution itself to be redundant in some way, so in effect there will be 3 layers of backup for all the files. It also needs to be compatible with a Mac. I could possibly do a drive dock, and just back things up twice, but I don't know if I can trust my girlfriend with loose hard drives.

The whole system is so she can backup her photos (she's a professional photographer).
 
Just to be clear, are you planning to have this external drive setup hooked up and powered on whenever the Mac is on? If you are this isn't a backup, it's just an external drive.

Why are you worried about the exterior solution being redundant? Are you concerned with taking the external setup off-site? Are you concerned just about viruses, drive failure? Or are theft or fire on your radar as well?

How about 2 external drive enclosures - one that is basically on when the computer is on (on-site) and a second that is stored off-site. The off-site one would get rotated to be the on-site drive daily or weekly.
 
It would not be hooked up constantly, it is only for backup. All the files would also be stored locally. I want it redundant because I'm concerned with data loss due to hard drive failure and theft/fire as well. Transportation is a concern and I would want to store data off site. 2 enclosures that rotate are possible, I'll have to think about that. Basically, since my girlfriend is a photographer, if this data is lost her business could potentially be ruined. Obviously, I'd like to avoid that.
 
A simple method would be automated backups locally to external raid1 storage and also (seamlessly) using a product like dropbox or sugarsync as an "off-site" backup.

If you don't want to do something like that then be prepared to become your gf's full-time systems admin. :)
 
A simple method would be automated backups locally to external raid1 storage and also (seamlessly) using a product like dropbox or sugarsync as an "off-site" backup.

If you don't want to do something like that then be prepared to become your gf's full-time systems admin. :)

I don't think either dropbox or sugarsync will provide the amount of data storage we need at a reasonable price (though dropbox is only a beta). I think it would be more effective to sync with another computer offsite than use a webstorage system like that.
 
Since you're concerned about disk failure I'd say set up RAID1 where it will do the most - in the workstation (I'm worried you're going to say it's a Macbook or isn't possible on a particular Mac and I'm not a Mac guy).

Since the backup drive will only be on a limited time the chance of drive failure is fairly small. The workstation drives will be on exponentially longer and would be more 'bang for the buck' in terms of RAID1. Having a single-drive external solution makes it smaller/lighter/easier/cheaper vs. an external RAID1/5 solution, and therefor more likely to have multiple backup setups to rotate the backups. Just food for thought...
 
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