Hard lesson learned - Everythings gone

[Pookeyhead]

I feel its far less than you think, given how fast fibre has spread across the country. I'm also not saying that a DIY home server isn't a useful solution, it is given the correct use case (and if its built properly, please for the love of god don't use software RAID).

I always used LSI hardware RAID cards. Despite what you seem to think, I'm not stupid enough to use software RAID.

However, I am refuting the point you're making by calling a WAN backup solution useless. Because for 90% of home users, it's probably the most cost effective and efficient method to cover themselves in the event of a disaster. It should not simply be dismissed because it does not fit your use case.

It's about volume of data vs. speed for me. Incremental back ups wouldn't be so bad at all, it's the massive amount of time it takes to get it all on there in the first place, and heaven forbid, restore should I lose my local copies of everything here. For the vast majority of people, the speeds necessary to make backing up and restoring the images generated by a 28 year career as a professional photographer are just not yet acceptable. I'm genuinely pleased you have such speed, and I am quite envious of such speeds, but unfortunately, how fast most people can go is dictated by the services available to them in their area... and they have no choice.

For some people, who perhaps have 30GB of images, fine... it's a viable solution. For those with many many terrabytes of images... far less so.

Realistically, once everything is up there - how long would an incremental backup take for you?

Not long at all... it's A) The initial upload... which will take 9 days, and B) a similar kind of time frame to recover it all should something happen. It's not the incremental I'm worried about.

If I use the cloud, it will only ever supplement what I already have in place here... not replace it. Even if I had a fast fibre connection that would still be the case.

I think it's worth the initial pain even if you store the most important files to you off-site and on the cloud. FTTC is fast spreading and I've just gone from 0.8Mbps upload to 18mbps, as long as you're not out in the sticks you will probably find yourself in the BT/Plusnet fibre coverage area, if not you will be soon.

18Mb upload would still mean a 10 day upload for me. I just can't be arsed Images are on three local discreet drives, a RAID6 server, and mirrored to an offsite RAID 5 server. Seriously... something pretty damned catastrophic that would probably need to leave a 20 metre crater needs to occur here before any data loss happens. Mechanical failure alone would need to have 8 simultaneous drive failures now I come to think about it. All three local drives, 3 drives in the RAID6 and 2 in the RAID 5... all at the same time.

And yes... both servers have battery back up for write cache before someone asks... and the main RAID6 server has a UPS.


Anyway... we're getting silly now... few people go to the lengths I do for data security... and I'm not advocating anyone else should do the same. My point is that you can't expect the cloud to be the answer to everyone's prayers. Some of us, through no choice of our own, are bound by the limits of copper wires, and also have a shed load of data. The cloud just isn't that attractive in that situation.

 

[Rojibo]

I wish I'd never used the term "the cloud" I hate that term. It's so web 2.0.

I made the software raid point for the good of anyone reading the thread, rather than yourself. Hopefully stop a few people doing something silly.

You could write all the data to physical media and ship it off to cloud storage company then just ship your deltas. Do the reverse for recovery, I dunno. I don't feel safe unless the copies of data are more than 100 miles apart.

The nice thing about a WAN Based backup solution is that there's no upfront cost other than the monthly rental, so Joe Mcbloggs can pay his £5 and off he goes protecting data. Compared to that of (at a guess, it's been a while since I bought anything consumer level) £500 for a NAS box and drives that he can back up his data to.

But then he still has to worry about getting it off site. Tapes, DVDs, USB hard disk stored in the drive at work? Probably going to be a USB hard disk or a copy from the NAS over the WAN.

To anyone reading this thread, and thinking look at these idiots rattle on, just give one of the many "cloud backup" solutions with a free trial a try and see if it fits. If it doesn't, nothing lost, if it does, all the better.

 

[phil-t]

I have had to recover 5 HDD's from family and friends in the last 3 years.. Ranging from drives with the click of death to accidental formatting..

It's usually the failing HDDs that are the worst ones.. I sometimes try anything and everything to get a HDD to just spin up for enough time to get as much data as I can back. .It's worth persevering with these things, and google can be quite useful.


On the subject of backup, I believe fully automated is the key here.. anything manual and people forget. I use simple disk volumes in a HP Microserver, so store everything on 2 HDDs, and all the important stuff like docs/photo's are backed up everynight, automatically, to another HDD in the server. On top of that, I also have crashplan running which automatically uploads each night too.. I have messed with RAID a few times, but all the cheap solutions (and even hardware ones) aren't truly foolproof when it comes to backup..