All that works IF you can afford to have multiple drives and all that. Plus, someone has to do the backups or make sure the backup program is working. My brother is not that tech savvy. In a way they have backups because they put the important stuff on DVD's, somewhere, and they leave most of the pics on the memory cards. Still, in my experience, Linux is easier on a drive. After more than 20 years of working on puters, that was my first failure. I have had a file system to mess up but not the drive itself.

YMMV

:D :D

Excuses, excuses:) But at the end of the day, it's your brother and his data, so it's none of my business. I'm just saying.... better safe than sorry:)

Yes, RAID can be expensive especially on the type of RAID level and the purpose of usage i.e High availability servers.

But, my setup is simple for desktop usage and not expensive, Just two 160GB HD for a total cost of $150.00

Second, the RAID commands are not that complicated. There are many examples on youtube on softwae raid that I learn from.

PS: Having a RAID setup is like having a backup. If one drive fails, the others they over until you replace the defective one.


:)

I get what everyone is saying. Thing is, I also take into account my own experience. It's no different than the old Yugo car. Some people loved them, some people hated them. No different than the hard drive brand reviews. Some people hate one brand and love another. Others love what the others hate and claim is always dead out of the box yet theirs works fine for years. Based on my experience with hard drives, the brands I use and how I use them, I have very very low failure rates. I use Linux on every system of mine that I currently have or have had in the past. My Brother to this point is a winders only person. I just find it odd that it works fine on Linux for years but failed miserably after three days on a windoze computer. Coincidence, maybe so but sure makes me wonder about my opinion that Linux is easier on drives than windoze.

Also add in I have to take into account my Brothers budget too. I would rather spend this money on a new rig but this drive is all he can do right now. He just bought a $8,000 lawn mower. He mows grass for a living so he has to have that to buy the bacon.

:D :D

I understand the budget issue. People may have more pressing financial needs than a spare hard drive. I have no problem with that.
The point I'm trying to make is that there are better hard drive brands and worse. Yet NONE of them can be 100% fault-free. It's not about loving or hating anything. It's a fact. Things break down and if there's some data on them that is of any value to a person, it should be backed up. IMO, it's a somewhat irresponsible attitude to say that because a drive has never died on me, it's not going to happen. It's like saying I haven't had a car accident for 20 years, so I'm not going to wear seatbelts.

Look I'm not going to tell you what to do with your or your brother's drives. It's your decision. You've got your reasons. I just want to make it clear for any less tech savvy person reading these posts that however good with handling hard drives Linux might be, it can NEVER be treated as a replacement for a backup.

Another car analogy: Based on some crash test results some cars "handle" car crashes better than others. Yet I'm not going to just ignore my seatbelts because my car scored the highest in a series of crash tests.

I think I've made my point and now need to come back to learning flipping macros in MS Excel...don't ask:(

Windows actually has a pretty good automatic-backup program. It's not nearly as easy to set up as, say, the Mac's Time Machine, but it's pretty darned good. A USB or Firewire-connected external hard drive with 1.5 Terabytes of storage was about $250 at ... uhh ... Wal-Mart ... the last time I checked.

The point, no matter what type of operating system you are running, is that backups need to be happening continuously.

The financial pressure can be a problem, had that, been there. In that case it may be worth a look to do a web search for free online storage, some sites give you up to 50 GB.

I use rsync and an external drive.

I admit, I dread doing backups because it's boring, but hey, if you don't want to lose the data, it has to be done or you'll be sorry.

The thing I like about rsync is the second instance of running rsync and beyond the backups are shorter because it only copies new files and files that were modified since the last backup. Great tool.

Well once he gets his mower paid off, we plan to build a new rig. His current rig is pretty old. I plan to have one drive for the OS, Linux of course, and two drives in RAID mirror for the /home directory. That way he has two copies of everything without having to mess with backups at all. This was the plan until the mower purchase came along. Let's say that was a set back budget wise. :eek:

Once on Linux, I'm going to introduce them to Kbackup and k3b. That's how I do my pictures and stuff that I want to keep. I keep one copy on my desk and one in another building, in case the house catches on fire.

I still think that if I had kept the drive running on a Linux box it would be still running. I hate windoze and I think it rubs off on my hardware. I can't say I blame the drive for being upset at the serious downgrade. :doh:

Right now, just trying to get him by on what he has. That's why I gave him one of my spare drives.

:D :D

NO !!!! A RAID setup is in no way a replacement for a backup!! RAID is intended to keep the downtimes short in place of failure, not to prevent data loss. It is still possible to loose data in case of :
- The most common, user error
- Not so common on Linux, but possible: Malware
- A bug in user-space software, for example your file-manager
- Bug in a driver for the hardware or filesystem
- Hardware-failure of the disk-controller

There is absolutely no way to substitute a good backup plan.

But it beats what he has now. That would be nothing basically. The best thing, no. Better than nothing, yep. We don't have fast internet connections out here in the sticks so some backup server over the internet somewhere is not a option. It's either RAID, DVDs or risking a loss of it all. At least RAID does it automatically. DVD's require someone to gather them and burn them. I may not can get him to even spend the cash on the extra drive for RAID. He thinks RAID is bug killer. lol DVDs, they seem to have done that much on their own. I did show them how to burn them tho. Just didn't know they were doing their pics with it.

Can the things you mention happen, yea boy they can. Thing is, if he is going to do a plan that means losing nothing at all no matter what happens, he's going to be in debt to his eyeballs. We are just talking about camera pictures for the most part. The good ones they already have prints of. It wouldn't be the end of the world if they lost them but I would like to do something to sort of lessen the risk. RAID should help some plus they can backup to DVDs on occasion just in case. A lot of pictures can fit on a DVD. I put about a years worth on a DVD. They take less than I do I think.

I don't want to give the impression that we are talking about some critical data that just can't be lost for any reason. It's just camera pics that they would rather not lose but not willing to pay a lot to insure they don't.

:D :D

Nope, RAID is the same as risking a loss of it all. Again, a RAID is not a backup solution.

If it is not much data, come on, its your brother, be nice and donate him one or two cheap pendrives.

Then maybe backup is a bad word. How about redundancy to data loss in the event of a single drive failure? I used to work for a computer place that made regular backups of data. The drive with all the company data failed with a loud screeching sound of the head scraping the platters. The backups, all three sets, were bad too. Turned out the tape drive was bad and it wasn't writing correctly. This is my point. The data is not CRITICAL. He's not going to spend much, if any, to make sure they never lose data. I'm not even sure he will go the route of RAID since it would require buying really two extra drives. I don't worry about losing the OS itself. I would have the OS on one drive and RAID for the rest.

As for pendrives, I have a couple that I caught on sale. One is for sysrescue and the other is what I use to transfer data from one rig to another where a ethernet cable won't reach. I'm not sure if they would use that either. Then again, they did burn pics to DVDs before. I dunno if I would want that for my backup either. They can do weird things sometimes.

Oh, the hard drive mentioned above went out when a 18 wheeler truck hit the brand new VERY high speed bump right on the other side of the wall. It shook the building big time. That was a $4,000 drive in a NCR computer too.

:D :D

I think you still don't get it. A RAID doesn't prevent data loss, only a backup can do that. The purpose of a RAID is to minimize downtime in case of a disk failure (which means that you can still work with the system, but slower, since the rebuild process runs in the background).

But anyways, if it is not important data and it is to much to run a simply backup script once in a while then we shouldn't discuss that here. Just wanted to clear out some misconceptions about RAID and backup.
Have a nice day, and good luck for your brother's business.

One of the RAID methods mirrors data. Basically there is two copies. If one drive fails, there is a second copy. Buy a replacement drive and put it in and RAID is off to the races. No data loss, just a new doorstop.

:D :D