Tag: Computers
Redundancy Redundancy Redundancy
by Alan Gerow on Nov.10, 2009, under Amazon, Insights
I like to have fun here at my Blog of Monkey Bloginess, but I want to put the cardigan sweater on and have a serious chat with you for a moment. It’s that important time in every young person’s life when the uncomfortable topic of protection needs to be discussed. I know, I know, nothing bad is going to happen to you. We all say that until one day it does happen to us, and some things can’t be undone. That’s why we need to have this talk now about how well your data is protected.
Recently I had the unfortunate circumstance of having a hard drive physically fail on me. And by hard drive, I mean, well, a hard drive. It’d be 10 years since last that happened, and I was feeling pretty confident in my ability to retrieve lost data from pooched hard drives. I had too much data to back-up on CD or DVD and banked on a delicate balance of luck and geek knowledge to see me through data mishaps and issues. But there’s only so much one can do when a hard drive physically starts to shit the bed and here’s my solution that has me resting easy once again.
Redundant Storage
The key to data protection is simple, it’s not an easy easy answer, but it’s a simple one: Redundancy Redundancy Redundancy. If the data is in three places, then you would need three simultaneous catastrophes (or one really big one) to cause you total loss. The first step is in storage, where if your storage solution uses redundancy inherently, then a single hard drive failure can be easily recovered from.
I’ve chosen to purchase a Drobo 800, which uses EnhancedRAID technology to combine the powers of multiple hard drives into one super drive that can recover if one of the drives should happen to fall. The Drobo also pools all the hard drive space together so multiple 1.5TB drives act as one 4TB drive. The Drobo isn’t the end solution, there are scenarios where it wouldn’t be enough: two simultaneous hard drive failures or destruction of the Drobo unit would spell disaster for the data on it. But at 4TB worth of data, there aren’t many other back-up options available; I know what’s first on my list to grab in case of fire. I can build a new computer, but that Drobo is coming with me.
Beyond the Drobo, or if you can’t afford $350 for peace-of-mind, I also have two 1TB drives (one installed inside of my PC and one in an external USB HD enclosure) where I use Microsoft SyncToy to back-up the contents of the internal drive to the external drive on a nightly basis. This puts all of my music, pictures, and personal files onto an easy to remove & run device. Unlike the Drobo where between four hard drives the space of one is lost, the direct back-up method results in a 1:1 usage of space, so two hard drives only give the space of one.
Off-Site
As previously touched upon, a fire is still my worst nightmare. If I’m not home and my PC, Drobo, and external HD all melt and cinder, then having multiple levels of redundancy doesn’t amount to much when everything is in the same physical location. To protect against this problem, my most important files, my pictures, get uploaded to an on-line back-up service: Mozy. At $5/month for unlimited back-up storage, I put all of my photos on Mozy so in case all hell breaks loose, my most irreplaceable files are protected somewhere else entirely that I can then download onto a new computer.
Don’t Interrupt
Lastly, I added one more piece to my data protection puzzle: an Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS). We had a couple of 30 second black outs recently that were enough to shut my PC down. Shortly thereafter I started getting hard drive issues. I had my hardware on a surge protector, but when the lights go out, there’s nothing to protect against. I believe improperly shutting down may have contributed to my problems, so I picked up an APC UPS system that hooks up to my PC via USB to provide one more level of protected for my hard drives and data: in the event of a power outage, the UPS system will send a shutdown command to my PC so it will properly power down instead of instantly die.
That’s my three pronged attack to prevent any more painful data loss at home. Redundant file storage, online back-up, and a UPS device. Depending on your storage needs, you can bypass the local redundant storage entirely (such as you don’t need 4TB of storage space for video files and have less than 160GB of music) or use burnable optical media, and then only pay $5/month for unlimited on-line back-up space. More important than copying my set-up which fits my needs is that you follow the first point: Redundancy Redundancy Redundancy. Just get your important files into multiple places, ideally in multiple physical locations.
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