Last year, two out of four of my Western Digital Black Raid Edition drives failed at the same time, I was running a RAID 5 array. I had to take my drives to a data recovery company, it cost about $10k to get my files back.

Since then I am running two RAID 1 arrays, using Seagate drives for one, and Western Digital drives for the other. I manually copy my projects to both arrays. I am using a 10,000 rpm WD Raptor drive for my OS and program files.

Yesterday I saw a Glyph PortaGig 50 drive, 500 gigabytes, and it has a three year warranty and free data recovery if it fails. The drive was $240, and I figured that $240 is not too steep a price for peace of mind.

However, scouring Newegg, I could have got a two terabyte Western Digital external drive for $180, and that is USB 3 instead of USB 2/FW800/eSata like on the Glyph drive.

I guess it is too late now... but do any of you think it was a foolish purchase? What forms of backup do others use?

With modern drives the time to rebuild a raid array means that an N+1 array stands a real chance of suffering a second failure while rebuilding...

RAID is a good way to improve availability (Which is what it is designed for), it is not in any sense a backup solution (Backups are for 'whoops I deleted the contents of the project directory..., RAID does not help here).

Personally my stuff lives on a raid 10 array in the basement, and is backed up to both tape (Remarkably cost effective) and over a wifi link to a low power box in a friends house across the street (I host his little backup box, so the arrangement works for both of us) and to a little arm machine with a USB drive in the boot of my car....
Anything really important gets backed up to a git repository in the states, as an additional precaution.

Both the off site backups are incremental and versioned so I can roll back to any point at the cost of some waiting.

I would advise encrypting the backups, it is amazing how much personal stuff ends up on a computer.

Don't forget that a backup device does not necessarily need to be fast, when you need it you probably don't really care that it will take two days for the restore from the tape robot, so USB2/3Firewire/Ethernet/SCSI whatever will do, it really does not matter.

I would not consider that any single hard drive (no matter how reliable) is a substitute for backup, what happens when it gets nicked, or there is a fire, or filesystem corruption or whatever.... If the data does not exist in 3 physically separate locations, it is going to be lost, and you had better test that you can restore from the backups occasionally.
I know of one place where when the backup program asked for a fresh tape they would just pop the one it had just ejected back in... Needless to say the backup was found wanting when they actually needed it.

So, no I probably would not have paid a premium for that hard disk, it is not sufficient to form a reliable backup system without further help and if you have the further help then its failure would not be a disaster.

One key thing is to automate heavily and script what you cannot fully automate, backup needs to be low hassle or you will not do it.

Regards, Dan.

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Audiophiles use phono leads because they are unbalanced people!

Quote dmills:

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With modern drives the time to rebuild a raid array means that an N+1 array stands a real chance of suffering a second failure while rebuilding...

RAID is a good way to improve availability (Which is what it is designed for), it is not in any sense a backup solution (Backups are for 'whoops I deleted the contents of the project directory..., RAID does not help here).

Personally my stuff lives on a raid 10 array in the basement, and is backed up to both tape (Remarkably cost effective) and over a wifi link to a low power box in a friends house across the street (I host his little backup box, so the arrangement works for both of us) and to a little arm machine with a USB drive in the boot of my car....
Anything really important gets backed up to a git repository in the states, as an additional precaution.

Both the off site backups are incremental and versioned so I can roll back to any point at the cost of some waiting.

I would advise encrypting the backups, it is amazing how much personal stuff ends up on a computer.

Don't forget that a backup device does not necessarily need to be fast, when you need it you probably don't really care that it will take two days for the restore from the tape robot, so USB2/3Firewire/Ethernet/SCSI whatever will do, it really does not matter.

I would not consider that any single hard drive (no matter how reliable) is a substitute for backup, what happens when it gets nicked, or there is a fire, or filesystem corruption or whatever.... If the data does not exist in 3 physically separate locations, it is going to be lost, and you had better test that you can restore from the backups occasionally.
I know of one place where when the backup program asked for a fresh tape they would just pop the one it had just ejected back in... Needless to say the backup was found wanting when they actually needed it.

So, no I probably would not have paid a premium for that hard disk, it is not sufficient to form a reliable backup system without further help and if you have the further help then its failure would not be a disaster.

One key thing is to automate heavily and script what you cannot fully automate, backup needs to be low hassle or you will not do it.

Regards, Dan.

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Do you work for GCHQ?

Time Machine is a great piece of software, so easy to use, absolutely no hassle at all. Dropbox is also good for your working projects. I've always done backups but have never actually used them. I hear a lot of stories but hard drives normally chug on for years and to have your backup drive fail at exactly the same time as your computer drive is pretty low on the probability scale.

You shouldn't get too attached to your data anyway. Don't be afraid of change, finish your projects and move on!

When my RAID 5 array died, I also thought it was highly unlikely that two drives in the array would fail at exactly the same time. However, when I brought my computer to the data recovery facility the technician told me that it happens all the time. He said the safest bet is to use redundent storage on hard drives from different companies, or at least different models within the same company, that way if there is a fault with a run of drives you won't get caught like I did.

I'd love to just delete all of my old data, unfortunately I work at a university where everything that happens needs to be recorded and archived.

RAID6 (which is RAID5 with an extra redundant spare) seems to be becoming quite popular.

Agree with everything Dan said.

For backups, at home, I personally backup to yet more hard drives. Agreed need at least 3 copies.

RAID is NOT for backup, it is for AVAILABILITY a totally different piece of the puzzle!
Assuming you are safe because your project is on a RAID set, even a mirrored set, is asking to loose data.

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Agreed need at least 3 copies.

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In physically separate locations!

Raid sets should indeed be built from disks from different batches, and it is always worth putting an additional drive to one side, so that if the electronics pack up the data recovery folk have an identical drive to scavenge for a replacement PCB (Makes recovery much cheaper).

I am somewhat surprised that in a university context you do not simply keep everything on a centrally administered (and centrally backed up) SAN or similar, its what we do at work and it makes for way less hassle, Gig-E is not exactly expensive these days, and 10G is getting cheaper.

Regards, Dan.

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Audiophiles use phono leads because they are unbalanced people!

Edited by dmills (21/09/12 06:36 PM)

Quote dmills:

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RAID is NOT for backup, it is for AVAILABILITY

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Abolustely. Sorry if what I wrote could be construed any other way.

What I meant to say is - my backups (which are distinct from my live data) happen to be on hard drives.

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Agreed need at least 3 copies.

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In physically separate locations!

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For some people, 3 copies in 2 locations may be acceptable.

Quote twotoedsloth:

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When my RAID 5 array died, I also thought it was highly unlikely that two drives in the array would fail at exactly the same time. However, when I brought my computer to the data recovery facility the technician told me that it happens all the time. He said the safest bet is to use redundent storage on hard drives from different companies, or at least different models within the same company, that way if there is a fault with a run of drives you won't get caught like I did.

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It makes sense for a bad run of drives to fail at a similar time, yes. It makes no sense to me why you would use RAID for a daw setup.

Quote johnny h:

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It makes no sense to me why you would use RAID for a daw setup.

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For availability and/or performance.

(but not instead of a backup)

Quote johnny h:

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It makes sense for a bad run of drives to fail at a similar time, yes. It makes no sense to me why you would use RAID for a daw setup.

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Unless I'm confident that the end user knows what they are doing with RAID, I tend to advise against it on the grounds that people get lazy and fail to keep backups if they think they have something like that in place. I've also seen far too many controller issues screw up arrays over the years.

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ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

Quote Pete Kaine:

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Quote johnny h:

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It makes sense for a bad run of drives to fail at a similar time, yes. It makes no sense to me why you would use RAID for a daw setup.

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Unless I'm confident that the end user knows what they are doing with RAID, I tend to advise against it on the grounds that people get lazy and fail to keep backups if they think they have something like that in place. I've also seen far too many controller issues screw up arrays over the years.

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Its such an unnecessary complication. The bare basic conventional hard drives are perfectly capable of recording huge amounts of audio and sample streaming. SSD drives for OS, programs, projects + streaming with a mechanical one for storage is the perfect setup for the majority of people.

I know you are all very pleased to tell me that using a RAID 5 array was foolish... but is anyone going to answer the question: Is a Glyph drive worth the extra money? I could have got a western digital, toshiba or seagate external drive that is at least double the capacity, and half the price.

Quote twotoedsloth:

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I know you are all very pleased to tell me that using a RAID 5 array was foolish... but is anyone going to answer the question: Is a Glyph drive worth the extra money? I could have got a western digital, toshiba or seagate external drive that is at least double the capacity, and half the price.

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Probably not, no. Perhaps its time to look in the mirror and feel mighty cross with yourself

I would not have paid a premium for the disk.

If you have good backups then drive failure is just a nuisance, and if you don't you will be shafted sooner or later even with a premium drive.

Regards, Dan.

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Audiophiles use phono leads because they are unbalanced people!

^ This! ^

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It wasn't me!
(Well, actually, it probably was)