[GRLUG] To Raid, or not to Raid, that is the question.

[Michael Mol]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 12:05 AM, Joseph VanDerStelt
<joseph.vanderstelt at gmail.com> wrote:
> So, here is the situation. I am about to send a server down to a data center
> in Indiana. I just purchased two WD 1GB hard drives to place in it for extra
> storage. I also bought a $25 raid controller, just in case. Should I even
> bother with the raid? I was going to go raid 1, so as not to risk losing my
> data and other peoples data. However, I have to ask... Would simply creating
> a cron job to backup key directories/files every 2 hours or so get the job
> done just as well?
>
> Just looking for a little input and maybe spark some debate.
>
> So far, I am leaning towards raid 1.

There's a saying: "RAID is not a backup"

If you want it for backup purposes, then you might find a better
solution somewhere in the realm of snapshots and/or incremental
backups.

With Rosetta Code, I have a nightly backup job that lumps the database
and a few file paths into a tarball on another machine, compresses the
tarball, and waits for my home machine to retrieve it.

In your case, you might consider something similar, but drop the
tarballs onto your spare disk. Or even not compress, but place them on
a partition on top of lvm which you can snapshot after each backup.

-- 
:wq

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