Hi to all,

I have question to all those who are good with RAID.

Can i use RAID as a backup system. ?

scenario:

I have a RAID 1 on two 80GB harddisks, I have a script that would break the RAID say around 8AM and i come in the morning and pop out that RAID and add another 80GB hadrdisk. and then the same script would sync that new disk to the RAID 1 system.

Do you guys advice me to do such a thing.??

another question is say if system die for some reason. would it be possible for me to retrieve the data from the 80GB that i have. which iam rebuild that RAID 1 from the harddrive i have poped out from the system and access it ??


thank you for your help.

MaaS

Any suggestions ?

Hello,

I'm not the RAID expert but I'd say that you'd better not use RAID in this way. RAID, as far as I know it at least, is not build to be used as backup. For as far as I know you could use it as you describe but you'll have to consider that rebuilding will take a lot of time, at least a lot more than restoring from a backup. Furthermore syncing also would take up a lot of time, depending on the size and speed of the disk.

So I personally would advice against this. It's better in my opinion to use a backup solution instead of misusing RAID for this purpose.

About the possibility to retrieve all the data, in a RAID 1 I'd say yes, that you could retrieve all the data.

For more info about RAID you could consult the Wiki.

I'm sure that if I'm making/stating errors someone else will kick in and correct me.

Kind regards,

Eric

Thank you very much Eric. atleast i got someone to reply. now this what iam facing.

Someone in my company had installed ESXI server to manage VM's now as we know that ESXI is a free version of ESX with limitation. with that said the backup speed on VMFS which is the ESXI filesystem is very very awful. VM Company made it that way so people would use the "PAID" version on ESXI. i have a Windows 2008 SBS console with 200GB of size. that is running as a domain controller it take 15 min to shutdown and i copied it to another NFS or LOCAL drive that took me more than 3 hours to backup. i have 3 other VM almost same size. Now i tried all BACKUP tools that are in the web nothing seems to work. VEEAM is slow, Ghetto backup involves windows that i dont trust and rsync and the list gose one. i only figured that RAID would be my best choice since i would break it in the morning and let it sync all day/night !

Thank you .

MaaS

Hi,

Please remember, all it takes to get a reply is a little patience .

Have you tried UNISON yet? I use that software to synchronize a lot of critical data and it works like a charm, at least better then rsync in my opinion.

That being said, you'll have to consider that in the best case scenario you could use this RAID possibility but whenever something happens in worst case scenario you'd be out of business a long time.

Isn't an imaging solution like CloneZilla a better option so serve your needs?

Kind regards,

Eric

Thank you again for those recommendation, but i dont think any of them are really compatible with ESXI.

but i would give it a shot with this. the only reason why i wanted to use RAID backup since I was running out of option since ESXI is very limited and dose not support USB. only NFS and ISCSI and both run very slow on ESXI since they want all VM's to run locally !

i would try it and see the outcome.


in case of CloneZilla should it be installed on the server it self or it could run remotely ?

Thank you again.

Have a look at CloneZilla. They have a lot of examples. You can use the LiveCD to make an image of a single machine or have a dedicated CloneZilla server to make regular images.

Hope you find something that works for you.

Kind regards,

Eric

Yeah CloneZilla looks good but its more like windows WDS, or Norton Ghost. I needed something that i automated runs every night without me coming in everyday and doing it. since iam not in that company everyday.

But thanks for your help. I learned something new .

You're welcome, whatever solution you find working, please post the results here so others can use it also.

Kind regards,

Eric