[Bill Benson]

Ok, I finally have everything for my new computer and am building it. The motherboard has RAID1 and my original intent was to set the two 1T drives up as RAIID. The thing is, RAID only really protects me for drive failure.

What my goal is, is to loose no data from a failure of any kind and to be up and running as quickly as possible as with the nature of my work if I'm down for an hour I can't quote or process orders for an hour. I will have a backup (2nd pc) computer so that makes things easier. If the problem is a virus, it would be on both HD's in a RAID setup, so this is no help for that. I could get a third one and flop out RAID drives.

None of this precludes daily backup to my second pc or an external drive.

What's the best way to set this thing up?

[student4ever]

If I'm understanding what your goal is, you can setup the RAID with one of the drives being removable. What you end up doing to swap the drive out is to break the RAID association, swap the drive and insert the 3rd one. Once the new one is in, you start a re-sync.

Now I'm confused about the backup PC though... how does that fit into the RAID concept? Is the RAID just data files or the full OS?

[Bill Benson]

The RAID is only one solution I am considering. How would you set up a linux system so you loose no data and have quick restore? The second computer really just provides me with a hot standby maching if my main computer crashes.

I don't see that raid buys me much except disk failure protection. It won't help if I accidentally write over a file.

There is an external sata connection, so I should be able to put the second RAID drive in an external box and flop them out periodically. Since it's a sata connection, there shouldn't be a speed issue.

The solution could be proceedural. Do nightly backups and name the folders by date.

Could do image files to restore a system as well.

I've got plenty of memory, so that's not an issue.

So how do you backup, not loose data, and restore quickly is really the question?

[student4ever]

restore what? data files? the OS? How quickly you can restore different things can be different and depending on what happened to a file, there still may be zero restore unless you FULLY engineer the solution to never actually delete something and not allow file overwrites.

The other issue is what type of interval do you want to work with as tollerable to possibly lose something? If backups are involved, then unless you're backing up constantly, you have a chance of losing something.

For data files, a RAID solution will protect you pretty well. If you are truly that concerned about data loss, I'd go with a good RAID5 solution with hot swap. That way, if any of the drives fail, all the data can be rebuilt when a new drive is inserted into the array. That's the upside. The down side is that you still have a single point of failure if the array unit fails. Then you have drives with nothing to plug them into. I know somebody who had this happen recently and had to go searching for the specific vendor/model they had so they could move the drives over to recover their data. Took time and LOTS of $$ since the unit was a few years old.

There's no perfect solution. You can get pretty close to one if you want to go nuts with redundant RAID setups, but that's overkill for most situations.

If you're just talking about data versus the OS, there are ways to get it pretty solid.

[Bill Benson]

Well, in a windows environment I used to put the os on C and data on D; do an image backup of C to D. That gave me an os restore point and it took 15 min to restore the image.

I did periodic backups of D (data) to an external drive. USB connection so it was slow.

I liked imaging the OS as it was fast to restore. Did restores mostly on my wifes pc. Don't know where she was surfing, but she found virus's. None recently though.

I'm just rethinking the best way to backup and restore since I'm setting up a new machine. Remember it's Linux this time.

important backup items are email real time, databases running locally, sites I'm working on, misc new or edited files.

[jello]

Originally Posted by Bill Benson

Well, in a windows environment I used to put the os on C and data on D; do an image backup of C to D. That gave me an os restore point and it took 15 min to restore the image.

I did periodic backups of D (data) to an external drive. USB connection so it was slow.

You can put your home directory on a separate partition and make periodic backups of it.

[student4ever]

you should be able to do the same thing with Linux. have your OS on a primary partition that you can make an image of. Keep all of your data on your RAID as a seperate partition mountable from any system.

Use your RAID 1 as your OS partition and you'll have a duplicate disk just in case. May require duplicate hardware if you have to move the dive to a new box. Then, have a network attached RAID solution that can be mounted via IP to your Linux box(es). This one contains your data. Make it RAID5 and you should have it available to any system needing it and have the least amount of risk for data loss.

That's one way to go anyway

[Bill Benson]

Thanks guys. That narrows it down. I was going to post about the partition issue in the Linux thread, so you beat me to the punch Jello.

[jello]

How about using unison/ to synchronize your files on different harddisks.

I did not use it yet but gonna