Backup of your unRAID system

[tillkrueger]

so how do some of you deal with backups of your unRAID system?

admittedly, it's pretty tempting to not back up with this level of redundancy, but most of us probably know that no system is fail-safe.

 

the reason i am asking is this:

 

i just built my first unRAID system to almost exactly mirror the MD1500/LL...i am now in the process of copying the 4TB of data from the RAID5 in my Powermac G5 to the unRAID...i had first copied all of the data from the RAID5 onto external USB Western Digital 1TB MyBook drives (this was before i decided to put together an unRAID)...i have collected 5 of the 1TB MyBook's over the past few months, with another 3 coming next week...frankly, had i known just how slow the USB interface behaves, i would have spent the extra money for firewire/eSATA...but who's to complain with that many drives.

 

as soon as i moved the data to the external 1TB MyBook drives, i moved the 8 x 500GB Seagate 7200.10's from my G5 into the unRAID...for the past 3 days i have been copying the data from the external 1TB drives back onto the disk-shares...again, slow as molasses...about 10MB/sec, which is all the fault of that freakin' USB implementation of those drives (and mine for not leaving the data on the RAID5 and doing a direct copy via LAN)...since i just found out that those WD Essential Edition 1TB drives contain the WD "Green" drive, the same one i just purchased as a parity drive for my unRAID (because of its low energy/heat characteristics), i may pull them out of their enclosures and populate the other slots in my unRAID with them...hell, if the unRAID could read HFS, i'd do it now and connect them via eSATA.

 

anyway, i'm digressing...back to the topic:

 

when i had the RAID5 in my G5 i used a SCSI U320 card connected to a DELL 124T tape-library...this LTO-2 unit needs to be fed data at about 40MB/sec, or else the tape will keep spinning up and then down to let the data-cache catch up...but now that the data resides on the unRAID, i may not be able to get enough transfer speed to feed the data from unRAID via 1Gb networking to the G5 to the 124T.

 

tape really is a two-edged sword...it's pretty cost-effective (the 200GB LTO-2 tapes can be found for about $20/ea) and it's pretty fast at about 40MB/sec...and with a tape-library like the 124T that holds 16 tapes, you can have automated backups going for quite a while (until you generate about 3.2TB of data).

 

on the other hand, i find the unit to be pretty unreliable, and lately it's been giving me too many headaches.

 

so, what do some of you do? if it were "only" 1 or 2 terrabytes, it would be fairly easy to just back up to a couple of external MyBooks...but i don't wanna have to keep buying big external drives...kind of defeats the purpose of the unRAID excercise.

 

anyone with clever/cost effective ideas that aren't tape-based? or do you just trust your unRAID to the point of sayin': if my house doesn't burn down, i'll be fine.

[NLS]

I never found tapes worthy of their name as backup media. Used many solutions (professionaly) inc. Ultrium etc.

The tape backup was useless more commonly than the disks that actually held the data. I really don't know why this solution still survives.

 

Anyway, I have chosen to keep backup only of my vital data and I don't consider "VITAL" data my load of movies and mp3 (although it was rather painful to build the library). I find my personal A/V/Photos/Docs to be much more vital. Also I consider my emulation work quite hard to rebuild.

 

A 500GB (and later maybe a 750GB) external disk is ok for this role (of duplicating data I think vital) and my EVEN MORE irreplaceable data are maybe in some third disk.

 

For a home this is much more than enough. Then it grows to hypochondria.

 

 

[tillkrueger]

haha...i hear you.

 

yes, the tape thing has served me OK for a couple of years, but now that the thing just keeps giving me cryptic errors at totally unpredictable times/intervals, i might have to ditch that method.

 

ditto on the MP3/Lossless-AAC/DVD/DivX collections...it's really taken years to collect it all, but i would/could survive without it...but my self-created photos/videos/animations/productions are priceless, and have to be protected at all cost...well, without the *all* part of the cost, if possible...of course, even "only" that part takes up in excess of 4TB already...oh well, at about $250/TB, i suppose it would be worth $1K to keep a second version of them on external disks and put them away at someone else's place...San Francisco can be a surprising territory, as i have known for sure since the 1989 earthquake.

[lovingHDTV]

I too only backup my "vital" data.  I have ~5 PCs that the family uses.  Each family member has an account on each PC.  I then redirect the My Documents for each account on each PC to a directory on the UnRaid.  This lets everyone see the same My Documents from all the PCs.

 

I then backup this directory and my pictures, downloaded music, and scans of all important documents using BackupPC to my brothers house in CA.  This gives me offsite backup storage. 

 

To get this setup, I sent him a drive to add to his backup server, installed rsync on UnRaid and configured it.  Now my "vital" data is backed up to his house on a regular schedule.  It is easy for me to add additional directories to be backed up by adding them to the rsync.conf file, then to the BackupPC config.

 

Has been working quite nicely for the last 9 months or so.

 

I did this because we had a picture get deleted and there was a misunderstanding that the UnRaid was "protected" so it could be undeleted.

 

I do not backup any of the DVD rips because I own the disc and can re-rip, though painful, if I need to.