[olug] To RAID or not to RAID

[unfy]

On 9/22/2014 4:59 PM, Obi-Wan wrote:
> On 09/22/2014 04:17 PM, Christopher R. White wrote:
>> I have over 500 gb of dvd rips, 10+ years of photos, thousands of 
>> hours of
>> music and more, nearly 1 TB total.  I'd really hate to lose it all!
>>
>> I lost my media once to a faulty drive, never again!!!
>
> If you're worried about losing your data, you need to focus on 
> off-site backups, not on redundant spindles inside the computer. 
> Redundancy protects you from hardware failure, but not from theft, 
> flood, or fire.  For the tiny amount of data you've got (only 1TB), 
> you can extract that from a backup drive in just a couple hours.
>
> Redundancy is more of an uptime issue.  If you can't afford to be down 
> for long, get redundant -- but get an off-site backup first!


^^^^ This.

RAID is NOT a backup solution.

I usually insist on a raid-1 setup on any home pc's for my own use. This 
way if something dies - the system can generally struggle along.

Here at work, we insist all systems are also raid-1'd at the minimum.

I avoid LVM stuff myself.  But I am very quick to loathe overly 
complicated stuff.  Don't get me started on recent versions of linux-ha 
or drbd.  I will froth at the mouth for DAYS.

-------------

Still gotta do a proper backup regimen for your goals.

I've had it happen with a home system, and it's happened here at work - 
during a raid rebuild the 'was good old drive' dies ... and bam... all 
your precious datas are set loose in the aethers. There's plenty of 
studies about this happening during RAID5 rebuilds too.

-unfy