backup & low downtime for home network

[Chris Aitken]

Robert Brockway wrote:

> On Wed, 5 Dec 2007, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>
>> There will be no performance hit.  In fact there is a performance gain
>> since reads are distributed between the two disks as far as I understand
>
>
> Well "it depends".  For IDE there will be a performance gain for reads 
> and
> writes if the two drives are on different channels.  If the two drives 
> are
> on the same channel there may be a performance hit for reads and will 
> be a
> performance hit for writes.

That I did not know. I am doing the hard drive installations now. So, I 
should put one drive on one IDE cable (I guess we call that IDE1) and 
the other on the other cable (IDE2)? So, then do I jumper them both as 
"Single/Master", "Master" or what? I guess each hard drive will be 
Master on it's respective IDE cable and the DVD burner and CD-ROM as 
Slave. In the past I've not put CD drive and hard drive on the same 
cable because I hear that data transfer speed will dumb down to the CD 
drive speed. Will this affect me or only when I'm actually /using/ the 
CD-ROM or DVD drive?

Thanks for all the information in this email.

Chris

> For SATA the situation should be better - I
> would expect both read and write performance gains.
>
>>
>> Of course raid is NOT a backup and never will be.  It is protection
>
>
> Absolutely.  Too many people assume mirroring offers some sort of
> backup-like reliability.  It does not.  Just imagine the result of an
> accidental rm: both copies of the data will be deleted.
>
>> against disk failure only, although compared to backup this generally
>> saves you a ton of work in case of failure, while a backup protects you
>> against corruptions and mistakes by letting you recover lost files,
>> although generally it can be more time consuming to do so.
>
>
> Once planned out home backups don't have to be time consuming.  I have a
> cron job go over overnight which sshes to each box and dumps full or
> incremental backups to a usd HDD.  I have 5x500GB USB HDDs and these are
> rotated offsite periodically.
>
> The key is _off site_ backups.  Keep backups of all your important data
> and keep at least one copy offsite at all times.
>
> The cost of USB HDDs is low compared to what an offsite backup offers 
> you.
>
> As to where to keep an offsite backup - a workplace may be fine.  If 
> you work at home then arrange to swap offsite backups with a trusted 
> friend. Be very very careful about encrypting backups (and filesystems 
> for that matter).  You can't just "get the password reset" if you 
> forget your passphrase or lose the private key.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Rob
>

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