Having backup harddrives in same case?

[looper]

I'm planning to build a NAS (non raid) for streaming to a Popcorn Hour. I'm interested in being able to backup all my media without having two separate machines. Is it possible/safe to have the backup drives in the same machine as those I use actively? Maybe possible to have the machine only spin them up/turn them on when a backup is scheduled and then, when finished, just spin them down/turn them off?

And on a side note, I'm wondering if anyone has experience of using WD Caviar Green 1TB to stream HD media. Is it fast enough?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Lavarin]

Just install the backup drive like any other hard drive. Just instruct your backup program to backup the data onto your new drive.

From what I hear, the Caviar Green's power-saving feature means that it may take a while to start spinning up when you're requesting data from it. But I don't think it will cause any problems if you're constantly accessing info on stored on it (an example is, of course, streaming media from it).

 

[royalcrown]

greens stream about 60 to 80 megs average, got one in my comp as a backup drive now.

 

[505090]

I would backup to an external drive, if there is ever a power surge you will likely lose your system and backup drive

 

[geofelt]

Three important questions for you on backup:
1) What are you trying to protect against?
2) How current does your backup need to be?
3) How much time can you afford to spend to recover?

re:
1) Hard drive failure? The mean time to failure of a modern hard drive is supposed to be 1,000,000 hours; that is about 100 years. It still happens, heat can increase the failure rate.
Viruses/malware?
Operator error, inadvertent deletion, kids playing around?
Physical pc destruction like fire/flood, etc...

To protect against such failures, it is best to not have the backup drive in the same PC as the original data.

2) Do you need real time backup, or will hourly, weekly, or on-demand backup be OK?
Is the data irreplaceable? Do you really care that much about it?

3) Servers need instant recovery, that is why they use raid-1 or such.
Most home users can afford a couple of hours to recover data.

You can be very paranoid about this issue and get carried away.

As a starting suggestion, get some sort of EXTERNAL backup device. Back up to it as needed, and unplug it when not in use.

 

[looper]

Thanks for all your answers.

My main worry was probably hard drive failure but now that you mention power surges I see why I really should go for an external solution.
What would be the easiest and not so expensive way to go for this? Simply buy two cases with mb's, psu's etc? Or just have an external USB drive for every internal one?

 

[royalcrown]

If your worried about power surges, where you gonna plug in your external drives power adapter ... best bet other than having an off site backup is a good UPS with quality power protection and filtering.

 

[geofelt]

Thanks for all your answers.

My main worry was probably hard drive failure but now that you mention power surges I see why I really should go for an external solution.
What would be the easiest and not so expensive way to go for this? Simply buy two cases with mb's, psu's etc? Or just have an external USB drive for every internal one?

 

[geofelt]

Simplest is an external usb drive. You do not need 1 for 1 capacity because backup data will be compressed, and only changed data will be backed up after the initial backup.
You are also not backing up unused space on the original, or such things as temporary files.

 

[505090]

Off site is the best option but a bit of a pain. Personally i use and external drive, when I'm not actually doing the backup it's in it's box in a plastic bag.

 

[looper]

I planned to, as 505 wrote, to only have the external backup drives connected during the backups and then just put them in a drawer or something. So they wouldn't be affected by power surges, unless I'm unlucky to have one during my backups.

Never have backed up any data despite some files I just moved from one hard drive to another so I'm not familiar with 'dedicated' backup methods. How well can I compress the data and how long time does it take? Sounds interesting since I was willing to just buy 1:1 size for the backup drives.

And thanks again for the fast responses.

 

[jsc]

My computer at work (self-built) has a removable drive. On Wednesdays (my virtual Friday, I plug it in before power up, turn on the PC, and use Acronis to backup my main partition, then power down, and remove it.

For all the reasons and more that geofelt mentioned, it's not normally a good idea to keep a backup drive in the same box as the main drive.

One exception to "normally". In one of my work systems (IDE) a few years back, I configured a hard drive for backup as Slave and put it on the same channel as my optical drive. I wired a DPST switch in series with the power connector to it so I could turn it on and off separately. Time to backup, flip the switch to ON, turn on the computer, run backup, turn off the computer, turn off the drive switch. Then power up normally. In normal operation, the computer didn't see the backup drive.

Took a little hardware tinkering.

 

[baddad]

On my systems I use raid 5 internally and a boot drive that has the OS and other software that can be reloaded. All files that are save from the software go on the raid 5 drive and then are backup to a single eSATA drive larger then the raid 5 drive. All the internal drives have 32MB of memory which helps keeping things speedy.

 

[leeteq]

Best having a physically separated extra backup drive.

If a drive fails due to a power surge, however, provided that you are "suitably insured", the data area of the drive is often not damaged, only its motor, so a professional hard drive recovery company such as www.ibas.com would most likely be able to recover all data - at a cost (there's where the insurance comes in...).