Backup strategy

Personally I'd use Solaris and the ZFS filesystem on whatever disks I have lying around; its available on Linux and BSD now too I believe. A windows box could then access it through samba or iSCSI. All this RAID talk is a bit 1990's.

Another option that I'm looking at for my photos (currently all on DVD's all over the house...) is Amazon S3. 'The network is the computer' remember
aws.amazon.com/s3
$0.180 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.100 per GB – all data transfer in
$0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out

When you add up the cost of a few drives that starts to look good value for backup storage. There are several sites that deal with how to use this service as an automatic backup.

So please don't tell me to get a large USB drive and remember to backup to it

Use multiple usb drives and ZFS ok I'll go back to work now.

blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/raid_z might be of interest to techies here regarding raid and zfs.

As a bit of an aside, and know this might be contentious, how aboutI rebuild my system with Vista? Now that SP1 is out (and I think SP2 is imminent) is it now considered stable enough? Or should I stick with XP pro...

My opinions of Vista and XP aside... is something not working in XP that you need vista for? XP pro is still supported so I wouldn't change unless I had to.

Well, I just got the invoice from the recovery Company. Thank God I've got VHI cover because my heart rate approached 300 bpm and my blood pressure was enough to set off our smoke detector. Jeez - that was one very very expensive crash. Its cost me than 150% of the price of the (high-end) PC... Credit crunch? My bum - data crunch here in Celbridge...

Anyhow, I've ordered a bunch of hard disks and a NAS box plus Vista. The data recovery folks recommended this approach over a RAID card

I'll send the two hard disks back to Samsung and hopefully they'll refund me the money - small potatoes compared to the recovery costs.

I'm really *that* familiar with windows that delving into other OS's fills me with paralising fear. But the on-line backup option seems cheap for storage but I'd be interested in how muc per month the data transfers would cost.

Given that the aim of this exercise was to firstly recover the data then secondly to put in place a system to deal with a winter's worth of FITS files, I'd be worried about those transfer costs.

So, I'm back to my software RAID system plus a 2TB NAS.

Next question - for a 6 disk software RAID system, what flavour of RAID would you folks recommend? I was running RAID 1+0 which seems to give the best protection (the recovery company said that if I was running anything else, I'd've lost everything)...

Finally - Al, given this would be a complete rebuild, is the system you suggest easy andcan the stpes be written down that even an idiot (like me) could follow? I won't rule out your suggestion but it would have to be easy and Windows compatible (at the end-user level).

Cheers and thanks again for your help.

Dave

dmcdona wrote:Next question - for a 6 disk software RAID system, what flavour of RAID would you folks recommend? I was running RAID 1+0 which seems to give the best protection (the recovery company said that if I was running anything else, I'd've lost everything)...

1+0 is probably best; its expensive in terms of disks but statistically safer than 0+1 & 5 if a second disk is to go. Having 2 disks take out a 1+0 is very unlucky!

Finally - Al, given this would be a complete rebuild, is the system you suggest easy andcan the stpes be written down that even an idiot (like me) could follow? I won't rule out your suggestion but it would have to be easy and Windows compatible (at the end-user level).

I think if you are very reliant on windows and want something simple then zfs probably isn't the best. The technology is great, but you'll need to install an OS you're not familiar with and administer it. From the sounds of it thats an extra level of complexity you don't want.

Thanks Al - that's great advice.

As it happens, Komplett are doing very good deals on SATA drives at the mo - 55 quid for a 500 GB so its not too expensive.

I'd really love to try out other OS's bu at this stage of my life, I'm so used to MS that I'd really be lost without it. I remember Windows 3.1! In fact, I remember my first hard disk - a whopping 40 Mb. And even before that, I remeber using DOS and using two floppy drives (A and B ) to load it every time you wanted to use it. Cripes, does that show my age...

Thanks for all the feedback, very much appreciated.

Dave

just bring this up again... I've been using s3backup which is a little tool that uses amazon s3. Its ok. It does the job but it could be better.

A couple of other people I know have suggested this www.getdropbox.com/ havent tried it yet but it looks promising. I also havent seen the costs yet.

Al,

As an amazon account holder, I found it very easy to sign up for the Anazon Simple Storage S3.
However, for the life of me, I can not figure out how to use it.
To a not-so-techie person like me, they certainly do not make it easy to understand.

I have seen stories that google may offer an online backup system. Have you heard anything about that?

Michael.