How do you guys backup your media?

[davidsmoot]

I'm putting together my first system mostly from stuff I have laying around. My Hybrid will be based off an ASUS AN-M2 motherboard (http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Abit_AN-M2 in a Shuttle small form factor case that I happened to have available.

My question is how do you (or do you?) back up your media? In this box I only have room for two SATA drives.  I might be able to squeeze a USB stick or a 2.5" drive in there as well if I got creative.

Once you spend a lot of time ripping your DVD's and music, I would assume you would want that protected from mechanical disk failure.  I could do raid but a hardware RAID controller is about the same money as an external raid enclosure.  I could buy a NAS with RAID for not much more.

So based on your experience with LMCE, what would you recommend.  If it matters, I am more interested in ease of use than absolute performance.

1. Software RAID built into motherboard
2. Buy a hardware RAID card
3.  Buy an external RAID enclosure and connect through ESATA
4.  Buy a NAS with RAID built in
5.  Just connect an external drive and run backup scripts regularly

What do you guys do?  Do you run separate physical disks for OS versus media or just separate partitions?

David

[ste_b_79]

Hi

I have my media stored on a NAS (old computer running FreeNAS with a single hard drive).

I use Rsync to keep a seperate copy on another box with a single hard drive (see http://freenas.org/documentation:setup_and_user_guide:rsync)

I dont bother with RAID, because I would rather use the money that a RAID controller would cost in running two seperate boxes (and if you have two sites - ie your house and your parents house, you could create a vpn between the two and use rsync between them to keep the files up-to-date - just be weary of the size of your media being transferred across the Internet!)

I also occasionaly manually copy the files from the main NAS (FreeNAS) to an external hard drive which I then keep in a safe place off site - you can never have too many backups! 

I also use P.I.N.G (http://ping.windowsdream.com) to create an image of the core (although with my media being on a NAS, I am happy with just re-installing and letting the core re-import the media).

hope that helps you

Ste

[alx9r]

My setup and reason for it is documented here:
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Alx9r%27s_Network_Attached_Storage_Setup

I now have 2x DNS-323 each with 2x 1.5TB drives.  That is where I keep all my media.  They have performed flawlessly.  The second drive in each DNS-323 is a full backup of the first.  I got my second DNS-323 about 6 months ago.  It worked out to a pretty good price per TB for a self-contained fully backed up solution.

If you are considering any sort of RAID as part of your media storage, I encourage you to google "RAID is not backup" first. 

Regards,

Alex

[davidsmoot]

Thank you, that is the kind of information I was looking for.

David

[jimbodude]

For me, RAID is fairly good protection against mechanical failure for data that I can recreate, such as media files.  Other things that are not re-creatable, like family pictures, require more care, like a proper off-site versioned backup system.

Note that if your motherboard has "onboard RAID", this is likely not really a RAID controller at all.  Generally, you need a special Windows driver that actually does the raid calculations in software.

Also, LinuxMCE can do software RAID for you, and manage it properly.
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Create_RAID_in_LMCE