russff :
Cost isn't as major a factor as protecting our data is, and tapes are very slow (sequential access) and less reliable than hard drives, so I think my days of tape backups are long gone. You say removing drives from a RAID system breaks the array....OK, that may be a good reason not to use this method. Is this the only reason and is it a big problem as long as the drives are reinserted in the same order?
The idea of using RAID for this setup is just to get the second automatic backup, so (other than breaking the array), why should it 'never' be used for backups?
Heya,
RAID1 (mirroring) is fantastic for backups. You're getting two backups for redundancy. Nothing wrong with going this route. It's no more risky than any external or any other backup scheme. The simple way to look at it is that no system is capable of being 100% reliable for your backups over time. The only way to make your success of never losing data is to have
multiple copies of it separately. Mirroring is exactly that. The more mirrors you have, the more odds you'll never lose anything. Ie, never put your eggs in one basket.
You could easily build something like this on your own, or buy a pre-made sollution. Overall, you'll get way more bang on your buck in a self-built system. Just grab a nice big tower, fill it with some drives, and mirror away. Toss in your 10/100/1000 NIC and back up to your whim. You can build a several terabyte solution (single system) for less than $800 ($200 system allowance, +/- 3TB storage, broken up however you want to achieve several mirrors). And yes, you could easily backup to several 500gig drives and take them out and swap back and forth. However, the more you take them in and out and re-use the RAID, the more odds you'll get a head thrash or other longevity related death to your drive's data or the drive itself. Swapping hardware over and over can hurt you. Instead of doing the big swapping thing, here's another suggestion:
Build
two systems, independent of each other. Each with a set of mirrored 500gig drives, or go higher with 750gig (cost per gig is getting great!). When one is full, start backing up to the other. When it gets full, switch back to the other. This way you're never physically changing your hardware or plugging/unplugging and powering down, etc (the more power on/off your disks do, the less long their life span is). They can just sit back, idle at low power, and be used when you need them. The only other thing to do is to make sure they're on good power protection units to ensure a black/brown out doesn't cut you off while they're writing (hope you planned for that!).
Example hardware:
Motherboard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131342 $55 (buy two) (Asus, RAID1, 10/100/1000 lan included, video included, 4x sata ports). Buy
two.
CPU:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103256 $60 (buy two) (AMDx2 4450e, dualcore, includes fan/heatsink). Buy
two.
Memory:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231098 $38 Gskill, 2gigs. Only buy this once, and put 1gig of ram on each motherboard.
Harddisks:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136150 $95 each. Get 4~6. Instead of going 500gig, get 750gigs so you have room to spare in case your data goes up for any reason. These are low power ones, so you can idle and save costs on energy.
Lastly, just get two cases and two PSU's that are decent. Throw them on your network. Do your business. Each system using the above scheme is only $325 each (mobo/cpu/1ramstick/2hd's), then add case/psu (~$100~150, because you want a good PSU) and you have two systems capable of what you want for about $500 each. Make sure you have good power protection/batteries, and you're set.
Very best,
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