[Evildave]

Oh dear.

Seatbelts = BAD IDEA because of a few exceptional cases out of MILLIONS.

Backups = BAD IDEA 'cuz people who tell you that RAID is not adequate are meanies.

Gotcha.

PROOF: Scroll up! Just because you don't personally accept the FACTS, that RAID won't protect your data from a very wide variety of errors and failure modes and even malicious intent doesn't mean us 'holy rollers' aren't absolutely right.

And you do talk just like a motorhead who doesn't believe in helmets or seat belts.

The cost of a backup is non-zero, but very cheap compared to the time it would take to recover all that you have done (or merely accumulated). Even if all you store on that RAID is downloaded/ripped, the time to re-download and re-rip even a portion of that content can be substantial drudgery.

Insurance. Very cheap insurance.

The kind of insurance where you get in the fiery car wreck, mangled into gorey wad of broken bones and meat and burnt to ashes, and someone presses a button, and then you wake up in your own bed an instant later, A-OK, no memory of the crash, and carry on with life as if nothing had happened.

That's a backup for your data.

[jwoo395]

waldojim, on 17 February 2012 - 12:24 AM, said:

LiveBrianD, on 16 February 2012 - 09:56 PM, said:

waldojim, on 16 February 2012 - 07:43 PM, said:

agrippa, on 16 February 2012 - 05:46 PM, said:

"SLC flash has the highest reliability and resiliency, with 50,000 to 100,000 program/erase (P/E) cycles. MLC NAND can sustain 5,000 to 10,000 erase cycles. TLC NAND has the lowest endurance, with 1,000 P/E cycles to as few as 500 P/E cycles, the researchers found."

So what does that mean for a average user? how many years would that be? any ballpark figures?

The latest drives have about a 3 year life expectancy.

What would you say for a near-enterprise drive like a WD Caviar Black? I mean, they do offer a 5 year warranty on those.

I have seen some that last for 10 years or more. Shoot all of my 10K scsi drives still work. Those suckers are over 10 years old.

True, I have an old 1998 Acer Aspire running Windows 98. Every file still loads perfectly.

[waldojim]

jwoo395, on 30 March 2012 - 04:56 PM, said:

True, I have an old 1998 Acer Aspire running Windows 98. Every file still loads perfectly.

There is no reason for it not too. It may die eventually, but that could yet be many more years.

[LiveBrianD]

waldojim, on 30 March 2012 - 05:29 PM, said:

jwoo395, on 30 March 2012 - 04:56 PM, said:

True, I have an old 1998 Acer Aspire running Windows 98. Every file still loads perfectly.

There is no reason for it not too. It may die eventually, but that could yet be many more years.

Of course, keep in mind that cycles are fairly harsh on the drive, so if you don't do that a lot, you'll help extend it's lifespan. I knew a guy with a Pentium 2 laptop, and as of a few years ago, it still worked (then he replaced it).

[waldojim]

LiveBrianD, on 30 March 2012 - 07:58 PM, said:

waldojim, on 30 March 2012 - 05:29 PM, said:

jwoo395, on 30 March 2012 - 04:56 PM, said:

True, I have an old 1998 Acer Aspire running Windows 98. Every file still loads perfectly.

There is no reason for it not too. It may die eventually, but that could yet be many more years.

Of course, keep in mind that cycles are fairly harsh on the drive, so if you don't do that a lot, you'll help extend it's lifespan. I knew a guy with a Pentium 2 laptop, and as of a few years ago, it still worked (then he replaced it).

I have 2 IBM A21 Laptops that are still working great (P3 750). Still crack wifi quite well too!

[NastyNate]

I am not too concered about this discussion either way other than its comedy value however I feel I would be remiss since it hasn't been brought up if I didn't point out about the Parity Bit error. Here is a link to a fairly short and concise description of the issue.
http://www.raid-data...aid-parity.html That said I have a raid array myself for speed purposes / space which I do not backup because what it contains is my collection of steam games which if something were to happen I would prefer to just redownload than spend the money backing it up. I do have enterprise level broadband however.

[Evildave]

Technically, that's 'backed up to cloud', since as long as you have your Steam account, you will always have those games, even if they're not present, locally.

I did buy a nice Synology DS411j NAS to replace my little EEE Box server with the external drive. Backed up and converted my two matching video drives to a RAID 10, and put the data back onto them. I still back that up to offline storage, just slightly less often, as needed. The box is basically an always-on Linux server with a ton of nice, friendly (actually, friendliest web interface I've seen, yet), easily configured little server apps, including the dlna server, though I had to come up with a kludge to make thumbnails with ffmpegthumbnailer and a script. Sips about 17 watts when idle. Backing up is basically plugging an external USB drive into it and telling it 'Go'.

I suppose the value of a backup is proportional to the value of what you use that backup for. I do work with my computer, and feel the value of not being put out of business, or otherwise losing work makes backup 'worth it'.

Though having rips of DVDs cached is technically 'backed up' by the pile of DVDs in those cake boxes, yonder, and are not job-related, I would not want to repeat the tedium of feeding all of the DVDs to the DVD drive again, either.

Significant time and effort LOST, possibly income LOST, too, versus another cheap 2TB backup drive in a fireproof safe.

I suppose if you never do anything with your computer but complain how you don't need to back it up and complain about Apple's existence when there's a perfectly good Microsoft in the world in a forum, then your time is valueless, and your computer probably doesn't have any unique treasures that will be 'lost to the ages' if you suffer some kind of catastrophic failure. So I withdraw all recommendations to back up that particular RAID.

[waldojim]

Evildave, on 05 April 2012 - 12:36 PM, said:

Technically, that's 'backed up to cloud', since as long as you have your Steam account, you will always have those games, even if they're not present, locally.

I did buy a nice Synology DS411j NAS to replace my little EEE Box server with the external drive. Backed up and converted my two matching video drives to a RAID 10, and put the data back onto them. I still back that up to offline storage, just slightly less often, as needed. The box is basically an always-on Linux server with a ton of nice, friendly (actually, friendliest web interface I've seen, yet), easily configured little server apps, including the dlna server, though I had to come up with a kludge to make thumbnails with ffmpegthumbnailer and a script. Sips about 17 watts when idle. Backing up is basically plugging an external USB drive into it and telling it 'Go'.

I suppose the value of a backup is proportional to the value of what you use that backup for. I do work with my computer, and feel the value of not being put out of business, or otherwise losing work makes backup 'worth it'.

Though having rips of DVDs cached is technically 'backed up' by the pile of DVDs in those cake boxes, yonder, and are not job-related, I would not want to repeat the tedium of feeding all of the DVDs to the DVD drive again, either.

Significant time and effort LOST, possibly income LOST, too, versus another cheap 2TB backup drive in a fireproof safe.

I suppose if you never do anything with your computer but complain how you don't need to back it up and complain about Apple's existence when there's a perfectly good Microsoft in the world in a forum, then your time is valueless, and your computer probably doesn't have any unique treasures that will be 'lost to the ages' if you suffer some kind of catastrophic failure. So I withdraw all recommendations to back up that particular RAID.

So the difference between the 'cloud backup' and my 'physical media contains the originals' backup is what exactly? OH! You don't understand how basic scripts make your life easy, and save you time... Ok then.

This post has been edited by waldojim: 05 April 2012 - 02:08 PM

[Evildave]

waldojim, on 05 April 2012 - 02:08 PM, said:

So the difference between the 'cloud backup' and my 'physical media contains the originals' backup is what exactly? OH! You don't understand how basic scripts make your life easy, and save you time... Ok then.

Ah, I see you need further education. It is my service to the community to eradicate this kind of ignorance.

For one thing we're talking about hundreds of gigabytes and terabytes of data, versus a typical home internet connection, so a matter of completely restoring in a few hours from a USB hard disk, versus a month of heavy downloading. If you have the most expensive fiberoptic FIOS plan with all of the bandwidth, then yes, backing up to cloud is possibly something feasible for that level of online backup, but you're paying over $100 a month on top of what a 'normal' internet connection would run, for that kind of bandwidth, which is like buying another 2TB drive every single month.

Also, monthly fees for generic backup of terabytes on the 'cloud' adds up quickly to cover the cost of buying a lot large backup drives of your own, every year.

Any 'cloud' storage web site can be taken down for little or no reason, which can make all of your data inaccessible.

Even something like Amazon or iTunes potentially may 'change' in the future. They may decide to charge for later downloads of media that you already purchased (at a 'discount'). Or they could close your account for a variety of reasons. Amazon has shown more than once that they'll delete e-books right off your device 'for you', if a publisher so much as sneezes. How much easier to simply delete content off the back-end so you can't re-download it, later? So, you could crash your drive, and discover that media you wanted to re-download isn't available anymore. Goody! Though with the DRM stuff, you might just have to download everything from scratch if you buy a new computer, anyway, if you didn't have the presence of mind to use a virtual machine to download and play that content.

Every month or so, the terms of service changes. Are all of those changes that you 'agree' to worth it? (Side note: Why is it you think this is a 'bad idea' for downloading games, but a 'good idea' for movies and music?)

For most GUI driven services, the download is downright difficult to automate. In fact, they usually go WAY out of their way to make it difficult to automate. Where you may have cached terabytes of video or other downloadable content over years, it will not be one simple operation to restore all of that. It will be lots of navigating and clicking and waiting for web pages to load, and sitting there watching little colored bars slowly grow. Which makes restoring your locally cached, probably DRM-infected 'collection' problematic. Not 'a month' for something like a backup-to-cloud storage service. MONTHS of tedium.

Your statement about 'not understanding scripting' only shows that you're being combative, and have never comprehended a single post I've ever put here on this site. You're quite obviously the one who doesn't understand scripting, if you think offline backup using incremental rsync or xcopy invocations to a USB drive is 'inconvenient' in any way. It's quite simply setting a calendar event to remind you to do it, and occasionally plugging the drive in and setting it off. A completely hands-off process you don't have to stand around and monitor, unlike massive downloads that will hang and glitch.

[waldojim]

Evildave, on 07 April 2012 - 05:09 PM, said:

waldojim, on 05 April 2012 - 02:08 PM, said:

So the difference between the 'cloud backup' and my 'physical media contains the originals' backup is what exactly? OH! You don't understand how basic scripts make your life easy, and save you time... Ok then.

Ah, I see you need further education. It is my service to the community to eradicate this kind of ignorance.

For one thing we're talking about hundreds of gigabytes and terabytes of data, versus a typical home internet connection, so a matter of completely restoring in a few hours from a USB hard disk, versus a month of heavy downloading. If you have the most expensive fiberoptic FIOS plan with all of the bandwidth, then yes, backing up to cloud is possibly something feasible for that level of online backup, but you're paying over $100 a month on top of what a 'normal' internet connection would run, for that kind of bandwidth, which is like buying another 2TB drive every single month.

Sorry, you lost me at some point... something to do with months of downloads... 35Mbit internet allows those downloads to happen faster than you realize apparently... Secondly, I think you severely missed my point. Which works for me, as you get to look like the fool now. STEAM VS DVD's was the point. Steam = original backed up on cloud. DVDs= originals backed up on *GASP* physical media!

Quote

Also, monthly fees for generic backup of terabytes on the 'cloud' adds up quickly to cover the cost of buying a lot large backup drives of your own, every year.

Any 'cloud' storage web site can be taken down for little or no reason, which can make all of your data inaccessible.

SOooooo.... I should be happy that only my Steam based games are on the cloud? And that all of my DVDs are... well... DVDs.

Quote

Even something like Amazon or iTunes potentially may 'change' in the future. They may decide to charge for later downloads of media that you already purchased (at a 'discount'). Or they could close your account for a variety of reasons. Amazon has shown more than once that they'll delete e-books right off your device 'for you', if a publisher so much as sneezes. How much easier to simply delete content off the back-end so you can't re-download it, later? So, you could crash your drive, and discover that media you wanted to re-download isn't available anymore. Goody! Though with the DRM stuff, you might just have to download everything from scratch if you buy a new computer, anyway, if you didn't have the presence of mind to use a virtual machine to download and play that content.

Every month or so, the terms of service changes. Are all of those changes that you 'agree' to worth it? (Side note: Why is it you think this is a 'bad idea' for downloading games, but a 'good idea' for movies and music?)

For most GUI driven services, the download is downright difficult to automate. In fact, they usually go WAY out of their way to make it difficult to automate. Where you may have cached terabytes of video or other downloadable content over years, it will not be one simple operation to restore all of that. It will be lots of navigating and clicking and waiting for web pages to load, and sitting there watching little colored bars slowly grow. Which makes restoring your locally cached, probably DRM-infected 'collection' problematic. Not 'a month' for something like a backup-to-cloud storage service. MONTHS of tedium.

Your statement about 'not understanding scripting' only shows that you're being combative, and have never comprehended a single post I've ever put here on this site. You're quite obviously the one who doesn't understand scripting, if you think offline backup using incremental rsync or xcopy invocations to a USB drive is 'inconvenient' in any way. It's quite simply setting a calendar event to remind you to do it, and occasionally plugging the drive in and setting it off. A completely hands-off process you don't have to stand around and monitor, unlike massive downloads that will hang and glitch.

LOOKY! I can click the little red button too!

Thank you for helping me make my point, it was very thoughtful of you. You don't bother with reading comprehension, or you wouldn't have gone off the deep end on something that had NOTHING to do with what I posted.

[Evildave]

Aww, poor waldojimmy is havin' a meltdown.

[traxxion]

Just for the record - nobody reading this thread should be listening to waldojim. All your data trusted to a RAID array - BAD idea.

Eventually, waldo is going to lose some data. Perhaps he doesn't value his data enough to spend a couple of hundred on a backup drive. Oh well....

Everyone else should buy a 2nd drive and backup EVERYTHING!

[waldojim]

traxxion, on 26 April 2012 - 01:16 PM, said:

Just for the record - nobody reading this thread should be listening to waldojim. All your data trusted to a RAID array - BAD idea.

Eventually, waldo is going to lose some data. Perhaps he doesn't value his data enough to spend a couple of hundred on a backup drive. Oh well....

Everyone else should buy a 2nd drive and backup EVERYTHING!

And how do you figure that "Eventually, waldo is going to lose some data."? Do you have some evidence that this will happen? Beucase I can tell you right now, that I am currently searching for some 3TB drives to replace what is in my array. After YEARS of running in this array, I have lost... NOTHING! At this point, I just need more space... only have 100GB left. That backup drive is doing nothing that my raid array isn't already doing - especially if it stays plugged into the same machine all the time.

[LiveBrianD]

Guess what? One of my family members had RAID 1 on her machine, and eventually LOST THE ARRAY AND ALL HER FILES. Yes, array failure CAN happen.

[waldojim]

LiveBrianD, on 26 April 2012 - 02:42 PM, said:

Guess what? One of my family members had RAID 1 on her machine, and eventually LOST THE ARRAY AND ALL HER FILES. Yes, array failure CAN happen.

HOW? Did she loose BOTH drives? Because you literally have to loose everything in ONE SHOT for that to happen. I am betting more on incompetence.

EDIT: Quick note - I have lost a single drive in this array once already. Popped in a new one, hit the recover button and away it went. Never saw a minute of down time.

This post has been edited by waldojim: 26 April 2012 - 03:15 PM

[LiveBrianD]

waldojim, on 26 April 2012 - 03:14 PM, said:

LiveBrianD, on 26 April 2012 - 02:42 PM, said:

Guess what? One of my family members had RAID 1 on her machine, and eventually LOST THE ARRAY AND ALL HER FILES. Yes, array failure CAN happen.

HOW? Did she loose BOTH drives? Because you literally have to loose everything in ONE SHOT for that to happen. I am betting more on incompetence.

EDIT: Quick note - I have lost a single drive in this array once already. Popped in a new one, hit the recover button and away it went. Never saw a minute of down time.

The hard drives were fine. However, the ARRAY failed. One day, she booted up the machine and it tried to boot from the network (probably the last option in the list of boot devices).

[waldojim]

LiveBrianD, on 26 April 2012 - 07:33 PM, said:

waldojim, on 26 April 2012 - 03:14 PM, said:

LiveBrianD, on 26 April 2012 - 02:42 PM, said:

Guess what? One of my family members had RAID 1 on her machine, and eventually LOST THE ARRAY AND ALL HER FILES. Yes, array failure CAN happen.

HOW? Did she loose BOTH drives? Because you literally have to loose everything in ONE SHOT for that to happen. I am betting more on incompetence.

EDIT: Quick note - I have lost a single drive in this array once already. Popped in a new one, hit the recover button and away it went. Never saw a minute of down time.

The hard drives were fine. However, the ARRAY failed. One day, she booted up the machine and it tried to boot from the network (probably the last option in the list of boot devices).

Arrays don't just die on their own. If the drives were fine, then it was a controller failure - or user error (IE: accidentally deleted the array). As the controller for my drives are integrated into the chipset - I don't think there is much chance of a controller failure that isn't also a catastrophic system failure. Again, as the controller is chipset based, replacement is easy - replace with spare motherboard. This feature has also been tested.

Also, I don't allow morons to touch my system that would delete the freaking array either.

If you guys can find some PROOF - as in solid evidence that an ARRAY - properly configured - will randomly loose data, I want to see it. If you can find proof of spontaneous combustion of an array - I want to see it.

"My grandmothers array just quit when I wasn't looking" doesn't count.

[Evildave]

Getting back to this: Lookup 'RAID Multiple Drive Failure'. A condition which can 'randomly' destroy all of your data.

Funny thing, most of the hits are for 'data recovery' people. The folks you turn to with a fat wad of money, when you're STUPID AS A ROCK, and don't have a backup. They don't have to find the instances of RAID failure. The RAID failure cases come to them.
http://www.cbldatare...i-disk-failure/
http://www.adrc.com/...lure_types.html

Another Potential Failure Mode At Home:

[Nuke61]

http://media2.servet...DL-Combined.png
http://www.servetheh...-part-1-primer/
http://www.zdnet.com...ing-in-2009/162

What they both get to in different ways is that it isn't a question of IF your hard drives will fail, but WHEN will they fail? With larger drives, it's not just total failure, but unrecoverable read errors. These are essentially a fixed percentage of storage capacity, and with larger drive sizes, with more data stored on those drives, the odds of having a catastrophic loss of data goes up quite a bit. RAID is nice, but it's not the same as a backup.

My personal setup is a daily backup to an external drive, a weekly backup to a 2nd external drive, and a "when I think about it" backup to a NAS running RAID1. Oh, I also have Time Machine backups going to the NAS.

[waldojim]

Nuke61, on 17 May 2012 - 07:27 PM, said:

http://media2.servet...DL-Combined.png
http://www.servetheh...-part-1-primer/
http://www.zdnet.com...ing-in-2009/162

What they both get to in different ways is that it isn't a question of IF your hard drives will fail, but WHEN will they fail? With larger drives, it's not just total failure, but unrecoverable read errors. These are essentially a fixed percentage of storage capacity, and with larger drive sizes, with more data stored on those drives, the odds of having a catastrophic loss of data goes up quite a bit. RAID is nice, but it's not the same as a backup.

My personal setup is a daily backup to an external drive, a weekly backup to a 2nd external drive, and a "when I think about it" backup to a NAS running RAID1. Oh, I also have Time Machine backups going to the NAS.

A single drive failure is NOT a complete raid failure. Unless you stripe of course.

I also like this zdnet source: Take the most extreme case possible and write an article on it.

Quote

With a 7 drive RAID 5 disk failure, you’ll have 6 remaining 2 TB drives. As the RAID controller is busily reading through those 6 disks to reconstruct the data from the failed drive, it is almost certain it will see an URE.

Ok - lets be frank a minute. Who the hell sets up a 7 drive array with a 1 disk recovery? I know I don't. Also, running a sanity check regularly on your hard drives helps. This is something that the article completely ignores. There is simple software out there to check for URE's on a drive, and correct it - so long as your array is HEALTHY when you run these basic checks.

The second source, with the pretty chart you posted, is running 20 drive arrays. Ok - I am starting to understand the sources are meant for Enterprise techs now. Understand - that 3 drives actually reduces my failure rate considerably first and foremost. Then lets cite the more appropriate graph:
http://media2.servet...MTTDL-RAID5.png

With a 2% chance of failure over 10 years, I think I will sleep just fine at night.

Though after reading all this, it looks like my next array will consist of 4 drives, and raid 10. There is something to be said for a <1% chance of failure.

This post has been edited by waldojim: 17 May 2012 - 11:59 PM