OK Rippers...What's your data backup strategy?

Hi Gary,

just curious to know what happened with Drobo, since I am using one. Faultless so far, about 1 year of service.

Did the operating system somehow fail ?  In which case how is your current set up any better, your first post in this thread indicated that could be a problem.

Otherwise I follow the same approach as you - irreplaceable stuff like photos and videos are backed up a third time, located off site.  For music, Drobo will suffice - and if drobo fails I just have the buggeration of re-ripping everything.  Not much fun, but not the end of the world.

The drobo experience taught me a fair amount about raid, and to be fair to them the devices had only been out 18 months so perhaps they have matured.

A couple of issues with them persist today.

1. For the spec they are slow, what you getting 50MB/s? I get that on a 250 quid QNAP. The drobo I had was the first with droboshare, which was just terrible, they even admited as such with throughput of may 9MB/s. Todays FS does not fair much about 28MB/s according to their own spec.

2. The forum is not available to you unless you have a drobo product, this should ring alarm bells.

3. The drobo apps is pants, just rubbish. Every other manufacturer of NAS devices seems to have this sewn up. I have DDNS, DAPP, UPNP, Web and Email servers etc built right into this cheap little QNAP and its perfect. On the drobo you are borderline into command line linux to achieve some of this stuff. It might have improved in the last year.

And in my experience I had two drives go really quickly. I may have been unlucky though. The time to get up and running safely again had to be measured in days, and in that time the dreaded flashing red lights warning you your data could go tits any minute. And remember when they do the logs are encrypted to mere mortals so you won't know what the issues was, so the only way back is to hope DR will help you.

I am just happy its out of my life now. Other people get on with them so I am prepared to admit its perhaps just me. 

They looked pretty though.

Geoff P wrote:

"I read a story of someone having a terrible time with a failing Drobo"

I think I read that story too, very frightening. My recipe against desaster (hopefully) is a 2x 1.5TB Synology NAS with RAID 1 and two additional external 1.5TB disks. One of the external disks is at home, the other at my office and I swap the location of both disks once a month. I copy the contents of my NAS to the external disk at home on a bi-weekly basis. So I lose no content in case of a simple disk failure, at most 2 weeks content in case of a fatal RAID or administrative failure ("rm -rf /") and 4 weeks in case of a catastrophic event like a fire or a burglary. I found it helpful to have a HDD dock for the external backup, so I can use bare hard drives without the need to buy external cases and power supplies for each of the drives.

If you stream music you almost need an IT department.


KR
Jochen

The hardware is one part of the backup strategy - the software part is another. I'm now in process of backing up my NAS to external HDD and the first problem is what file system should I use on it? My NAS is linux based and is formatted with xfs, the external drive came preformatted with FAT32. If I leave it so I'd have the flexibility to be able to read its content on all my computers (win + mac + linux) and even on my Qute, but I saw there are some troubles with the capital letters (and I suspect with UTF-8 special chars) in the file names. If I format it to xfs I have to find some extra tools to be able to read its content from my wins and macs. Anyone with experience on this topic?

Oh Dear !!
A quick glance at my Drobo when I got back from work showed yet another red light to indicate that it has had a drive failure ,that's now two out of four drives in two weeks . I have to say that is a little bit of a concern . Also I have noticed that even with the drives spun up , when you first access the shares in finder ( Mac ) it takes over thirty seconds before the shares appear and are accessible , surely far too long .
I had a chat with the store that I purchased the Drobo from to express my concerns and they usually find Seagate Barracudas very reliable drives . They have offered me a full refund if I am not happy with the Drobo and therefore I have decided to send it back as I'm afraid I'm very worried about my data being lost.
It's a shame because I had such high hopes for the Drobo . It seems Gary may have a point .
Luckily for now I still have the Link station Live that the Drobo was to replace and that is filling in back up duties but I will look around for something with more capacity as the Buffalo is quite full  .

Ed

Good question.

There are many methods to back-up.  Not many actually know (until it is too late), what/how they are performing backups.  Keep in mind different software may call these actions by other names,

You can "Synchronize" two drives, meaning anything on Drive A that is not on Drive B will be copied, and vice-versa.

You can "Echo", where any changes on A will effect a change on B.

You can "Contribute", which doesn't delete anything from B but will copy anything new from A.

They all have their own merits and pitfalls.  I find it best to Sync first, then Echo,  Every so often perform another Sync (preview only), and see if it tries to copy anything back from B to A.  If it does just manually delete those from B.

With Sync you can never really delete something.
With Echo, if you accidentally delete from B it will never be backed up again.
With Contribute Drive B becomes HUGE but archives everything.

As long as no one confuses RAID with backup.



Tog

pcstockton - I'd suggest that versioning is important. If I edit a file (or say change the tags on a rip) although I want that new version backed up, I might also have made a mistake, and so I don't want the old version deleted as I might want to restore it. My cloud-based carbonite backups do all this very nicely.

This is what I like about Time Machine. It makes backups a series of snapshots so I can just browse to any folder on my system on any given date it is backed up (usually about a month). Versioning is simply what the file was on a given day and I navigate it the same way I navigate my desktop. I even had to copy my system to a spare computer when my fan broke and restore it after it was serviced. It was drop dead simple and quick. Time Machine really is one of the better OS features Apple has introduced.

Likes,

That is exactly my point.  You need to think about exactly how you want things to work.

I, for example, would not want to keep multiple files versions.  If I did I would have done so for a very good reason and would most likely have all versions on both drives.

I do a straight mirroring of my "Listening" drive (Drive A).

If I make a "mistake" in tagging or naming on Drive A.  I simply fix it.  It is irrelevant if the version on Drive B is also wrong.  It will be fixed upon next back-up.

-Patrick

OKI, presumbly you are simply backing up to the USB drive. In which case does your NAS not have usb back up capabilitiy?

Mine is set to NFTS I think, it makes no difference to me a mac can read but not write to NFTS and its windows native, so in both cases I can get the data off the drive no problem.

I wouldn't use FAT in this context as any single file over 4 gig and you are in trouble.

Hi garyi and thanks for the hint with the web-interface - this made me to read the manual and this really helps sometimes :-). NTFS is no go for me because the NAS is linux based and it can't write to NTFS partitions. According to the manual best option is to format the drive to XFS, because FAT formatted drives have problems with the special mac files, such as .DS_Store. And all this can be done through the web interface of the NAS.