backing up

[Bud]

I have a 500Gb file server Id like to backup to so I could restore god forbid anything happen to it, whats the best way to do it

[Leonardo]

Couple questions:


1) 500GB - is that capacity of the system, or volume of data to back up?
2) Do you need to archive sets on a routine basis, or just make a complete backup now an then?

[Bud]

well right now its 300GB of data. Id like to do back-ups about evety 2 weeks. Maybe have 2 back-ups on file

[TheBaron]

the BEST way would be Raid-1
the EASIEST way without any extra setups would be buy 500*(however many backups you need) worth of drives

[Bradley99]

the BEST way would be Raid-1...
Not sure about that. The Raid will keep you from having to restore from backups when a drive fails, but its not a replacement for backup. Two stories:

Where I work there are thousands of PCs with multiple network drives and a huge Raid farm in some building somewhere. One day one of the primary network drives went down. It was down for a week while we flew in Reps from the hardware manufacturer of the Raid server, HP, and of the backup software company, to direct the restoration of the drive.

It went like this: A drive in the Raid failed so it was hot swapped. Then another drive failed so it was swapped. I think things were okay at this point, the Raid could still rebuild. Drives kept failing until the Raid was not rebuildable, and we lost the entire Raid. The problem was that the Raid controller started eating drives.

The second story is about a friends machine. Its power supply blew up just before we launched a LAN party and it took out everything in his machine except one CD burner - all HDs, CDs, DVDs, sound card. The worst thing is he had to play games on a spare machine with crappy performance. All data was lost, 80 GB of mp3 files. The best thing is that he got to build a new gaming machine.

The above story implies that a Raid server should have a separate power supply for each drive, or else a power supply with a crowbar in the supply outputs. I expect (or rather hope) that good supplies have crowbars in them but I don't really know. My friends el cheapo brand did not.

...the EASIEST way without any extra setups would be buy 500*(however many backups you need) worth of drives
The easiest might be to use a number of Firewire drives for your backup storage.

[Leonardo]

Here's the way I do it - perhaps not for you, but maybe some ideas for you:

On each home computer I run a second hard drive. Once a week a make a Ghost image of each computer's partitions to the computer's backup drive. Well, there's still a risk that a catastrophic failure, such as massive power surge or failing motherboard could wipe out both drives. I also run a secondary backup. I have an external USB2/Firewire HDD enclosure containing a 200GB hardrive. I back up both computers to this external drive also. When this external drive is not in use, I turn it off. (Probably should disconnect the power source as well. Hmm, I just did that!)

I know that tape archives/backups are popular with industry. If you don't need regular archiving, perhaps a good solution for you, and relatively economical, would be external hard drives. Don't get an external unit pre-made - they are expensive and usually not expandable. I'd recommend buying the enclosure of your choice; then the drives of your choice. The enclosure I have is tooless. You could swap out a drive in it in less than two minutes.

[Bud]

what about raid 5

[Black Hawk]

Well then you need mass amounts of $$$ ;D

[Tex]

Raid of any sort does not replace a backup.

Tex