To backup or not

[admin_exported]

This in a common dilemma.

You spent hours backing up up your cd (and dvd ???? naughty! naughty!) collection to your NAS. But do u invest in another NAS to act as backup and safeguard all your time and effort?

Most HD manufacturers quote impressively low failure rates. For example Samsung currently quotes a MTBF (mean time between failures) of 500,000 hours which equates to around 57 YEARS of continuous use.

Yet in the space of 5 years I have had 2 drives out of 8 fail - although those failures were near the beginning of this period and I havent had any failures since.

Currently I just have the drives in my 2 - 4bay NAS set up as singles so if one fails I only lose the stuff on that drive. Actually, at the first sign of trouble I will transfer the lot to a new drive.

The question is - do u backup or do u take ur chances? The more storage u have the more u would have to spend on backup.

 

[The_Lhc]

I'd have thought with 4 drives you'd be better off setting them RAID-5, that way if one fails you don't lose anything, buy a new drive, slap it in and off you go again.

That doesn't save you against controller failure or fire or any other type of failure though, so a backup is always a good idea.

 

[John Duncan]

I have all my stuff on the Mac as master, and two copies on two other drives. Works for me.

 

[DavieCee]

I back up twice. One set of HDs at home (2 x 500Gb & 2 x 1Tb) & another set of HD's at the office in case of fire

.

I have too many work related files/photos/music to fit on a laptop (circa 2.5Tb) so I only keep current stuff (and music) on the laptop and I dread to think of the hassle and what would happen if the computer HD failed terminally without back up

 

[Anonymous]

as you already know specs are not always what they seem!! and its only a matter of time until something goes wrong so id say back up, you dont need another NAS to do it, a seperate hard drive on another PC will do the job as well at a much lower cost, ideally the back up should be physically located somewhere else but if thats not an option them back up to a different machine will solve most problems (except theft & fire)

 

[Anonymous]

The problem I'd have with raid 5 is that is can take days to rebuild the raid if a drive fails. And while its rebuilding its out of use.

But cost-wise raid5 is probably the best solution.

 

[The_Lhc]

edsib1:The problem I'd have with raid 5 is that is can take days to rebuild the raid if a drive fails. And while its rebuilding its out of use.

That's a function of the power of the processor on the raid controller but how long would it take you to repopulate the disk that failed? The system shouldn't be out of use whilst it's rebuilding anyway, it might be slow(er) but the whole point of RAID-5 is that it should carry on as normal with one disk down, the rebuild would carry a performance overhead but it shouldn't prevent access to the data altogether.