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What is your preferred server OS for home use? And Why?
40hz:
^What can I say? Your individual performance and mileage may vary. :)
Got a Northgate 386-20 with a 80Mb drive in it that still boots up WFWG on cue everytime I hit the switch. I've had two server drives go south on me twice (different machines) in the last 6 months. Top quality units too. Both were members of RAID arrays. Both cases encountered a second member drive failure - one during the rebuild (RAID-1); the second (RAID-5) one month and 4 days after the rebuild.
Saw that exact same thing happen once the year before that.
Please underdtand I'm not trying to read too much into it. We all know drives fail all the time.
But it has made me reassess my opinion of exactly what RAID brings to the table. And also what representations I'm making to my clients about it.
Stoic Joker:
I hear ya... I had a client with 4 drives in a RAID5 array, one drive failed ... but nobody said anything. I got there 3 months later after they'd been screwing with it for awhile. I managed to get it to rebuild and the box came back online. There were errors showing in the logs that another disk was failing, so I shut the box back down and told them not to run it until we got some replacements. They did not listen and flipped the thing back on the instant I left the parking lot. Three days (of constant use) later two more of the drives failed.
To the greatest of plans there is always the perfect flaw...
Whoever set up their backups did it wrong. Data Was UnRecoverable.
But other than that my experience with RAID has been positive.
JavaJones:
Stoic, one of the things you seem to be implying above is that RAID can be a stand-in for backup (the comment about how do you backup 10TB of data). As far as I understand that's contrary to common wisdom about RAID. Working on that assumption then, even if you do have it in a RAID, you should back it up anyway, in which case if the main benefit of RAID is its redundancy, then a good sync/backup system gives you the same benefit. Hence why I don't really see the value of RAID in a low-cost, home user environment. For enterprises where they can afford to have both high-end RAID *and* a good backup system, and where high uptime is a requirement, RAID absolutely makes sense.
When I said "complexity" I wasn't necessarily referring to the end-user interaction and maintenance, more to the complexity of the *system* (and I think you significantly overestimate the complexity of a properly setup syncing system - it's essentially automatic and largely maintenance free). A RAID setup is inherently more complex in terms of hardware than a bunch of independent disks running off SATA on the motherboard (for example). The more "moving parts" and interconnectedness, the more a failure in any part of the system can affect the whole, even if redundancy is a part of the architecture (as it is in RAID). A prime example of that is the battery backup for cache operations on a RAID controller. What if the battery fails, does the user know how to replace it? (and with older off-lease equipment wouldn't it be even more likely to fail?) And if the power goes out while the battery is dead, the whole array could be corrupted. Power goes out with a stand-alone SATA drive and the worst thing that could happen is the drive that is being accessed at that moment has a bit of corruption. In 15 years of working with home and small business PCs I've not seen anything more than minor file corruption from power loss issues.
As to my data setup and speeds of access, the 10-20TB are on my media "server" and I don't usually access those remotely. I watch movies through my HDTV straight from the media machine. The only thing I will occasionally stream to other devices in the house is music, or maybe a TV episode (usually just do Netflix for that though). If I had more TVs in the house this might be more of a concern.
Anyway, what I do with the Lacie 4big is quite different. I have all my digital photos (about 60,000, around 300GB), my work files, project files, Terragen files (100GB or so), etc. on there. In truth I only have about 1.1TB of that filled up. And that's actually the most important data for me to back up. But access speed is important because I work with large image files frequently, and don't want to be pushing and pulling them over the network all the time. Imagine browsing an image catalog of 20+MB images. Flick through a few images and you'll see slowdown on the network, but with a modern, fast drive, on local access the speed is fine. I can't speak for superboyac's needs as far as backup/redundancy or external access on his proposed 20TB of data, but if he's accessing it over the network, any speed benefit of RAID will be lost anyway.
- Oshyan
Stoic Joker:
Stoic, one of the things you seem to be implying above is that RAID can be a stand-in for backup (the comment about how do you backup 10TB of data). As far as I understand that's contrary to common wisdom about RAID.-JavaJones (January 06, 2011, 06:23 PM)
--- End quote ---
Many of the really high-end deduplicating RAID6 storage devices claim to be able to eliminate the need for a backup. However I'm not entirely sold on that idea either. I prefer to have RAID as a first line of defense, and then have a backup for those "special moments" when shit really hits the fan.
Here's the thing, from SMBs to SOHOs down to the average Home Owner, everybody is on-a-budget. So what typically happens is enough hardware is bought to store the data being used. Some type of backup is discussed and is maybe even used a few times. Then the data grows and the space needed to store it gets bigger. Now it all no-longer fits on the backup, so the "important stuff" discussion ensues. Either that or somebody comes up with the "Let's do an incremental backup" idea, and nobody has the forethought to shoot them for saying it ... before the plan is put in place.
Note: I'm cringing right now just thinking about the number of time I walked into a new client to find they've been using the same five pieces of media to do incremental backups, for the last five years ... Chance of a successful recovery? Zero!
Both scenarios tend to end badly as backups just love to fail. And they do so at an extremely high rate. RAID on the other hand, could fail. Synchronization & backup schemes both have the same (glaring) flaw. The are simple, easy, set-it-and-forget-it systems. ...and it's that last, forget it, part that bites'em in the ass every time!
Synchronization, like mirroring (RAID1) both like to give people two identical copies of the same error. So if a disk fails in the middle of a sync... (point here being every system has a weak point)
Now for the average end user that comes trotting home with a brand new PC, a few ideas of what they can do with it, and maybe even a shiny new digital camera... Obviously a server would be a completely stupid to even suggest. (I'm picturing Goofy from the old Disney driving cartoons trotting out of a BestBuy here)
However, you and SB are not typical end users. You have an established system architected into a strategy that is so far working for you. Great go with it. SB on the other hand, is looking to start-from-scratch (so to speak), and is coming out of the gate planing on warehousing 10+TB of data. Those NAS boxes ain't cheap, as anything with more than 2-3 slots is well over $1,000. So if you looking at budgeting enough money for three of those ... You are much better off going with the off-lease commercial hardware that will give you a true scale-able hardware RAID configuration for a fraction of the money you would have spent on the consumer grade stuff.
Even if you are working out of your mother's basement (not saying you guys are), with 10+TB of data you have an enterprise class problem ... Which should be handled in much the same way regardless of where the data is and whom it belongs.
I'm hoping I covered everything as this has takes awhile for me to type. :)
superboyac:
Thanks Stoic, believe me, i read every word of that.
What I need to do is sit down and visually map out my backup strategy. Once I do that, I can post it here and everyone can debate all the weak points. But before I do that, and I imagine it will take me a while at the rate I'm going, I do have a few main points to discuss. Please keep in mind that I do not understand everything I am about to say in the detail I am used to understanding things before I act on it.
--I STILL do not understand how RAID is useful to me. I'm not trying to backup an OS or anything. Just standalone files and folders (mostly media: music, video, docs, etc.). I still consider RAID more of a performance thing than a backup. I get the rebuilding thing, but I don't see any advantage compared to just copying all my files/folders onto a fresh hard drive. That, to me, is the same thing as "rebuilding" a drive. The benefit is that the physical drive is a standalone unit, which I really desire. I LOVE the idea of pulling a drive out at anytime and using it in any other computer. I don't like the idea of RAID for my purposes.
--The one thing I am worried about and will probably spend the most time thinking about: how to prevent BAD backups and only have good backups. Let me explain. Let's say I have a hard drive, and I back it up with double-redundancy using two more hard drives and syncing (SFFS). Now, let's say the original drive got infected with a virus that got into a bunch of my files. Soon after, that virus will be backed up to three places. And now I don't have an original GOOD version anywhere! How do you prevent that? It doesn't help if you back up with multiple redundancy if they all have the same BAD files.
So then I think, well, the backups should be staggered somewhat. In other words, maybe one drive backs something up once a week, and the other once a month. That's good, right? Eh...it's ok. I'd like something better.
Then we start thinking incremental backups or versioning. Well, I'm not really a big fan of that either because, for one thing, the files are not standalone anymore. You're going to need some kind of software or something to extract whatever file you want from the backup. And again, it's not a exact copy of the files/folders...it's more like an archive of files/folders. The other problem I have with it is I can't incremental/version everything. Otherwise it would be too big. So then I have to think about what's important and what's not, and I don't want to do that.
So I just don't know what the optimal way to backup things is. I'm sure all of this has been well thought out for big companies. I can't imagine big companies not having something rock solid and that covers all bases. But then again, I'm never surprised anymore if that's not the case.
I just don't know what the perfect solution is. I've read mouser's long backup document, and I even wrote a shorter one here myself. But there are too many holes right now in my strategy, and furthermore, it's a puzzle that I haven't thought through long enough.
Cmon people, we're talking here as if it's the first time we've all ever thought about backing up. With all the computer people here, and professional IT people, someone MUST have a really solid solution that is already in practice, no? Am I wrong?
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