Raid 5

Chimp Paradox · 8 Dec 2014 at 08:43

I currently have 2 drives on my computer which are mirrors of one another for my photography business, plus they back up to crashplan.

I am considering RAID 5. Is this a good solution?

Doomedspeed · 8 Dec 2014 at 08:54

You're best sticking with what you have (RAID1).

See here: http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/08/raid-levels-tutorial/

As stated you'd need another disk for RAID5 and writing to the disks would be slower, so it may cost you time, as i assume yours business is pretty equal on read/write..

Cromulent · 8 Dec 2014 at 09:01

Chimp Paradox said:
I currently have 2 drives on my computer which are mirrors of one another for my photography business, plus they back up to crashplan.

I am considering RAID 5. Is this a good solution?

I don't think RAID 5 will be a big upgrade for you for the reasons stated in the post above mine. But you would get better performance if you went with RAID 10.

Which is effectively two stripped RAID 0 arrays in a RAID 1 configuration. Reads and writes will be faster and you'll still have the advantage of allowing one disk to fail and still be able to recover your data.

You would need two extra hard drives for this though.

Chimp Paradox · 8 Dec 2014 at 09:50

Hmm, sounds like what I have is best then.

Especially as new photos also get copied onto my SSD until the cloud has finished taking a back up.

Anything else I ought to think about/consider?

syn3rgy · 8 Dec 2014 at 12:13

The only thing I have additional on mine is, along with the backup to crashplan, a backup to an external drive as restoring from crashplan (should your RAID die completely for some reason) would be a very long progress depending on how many GB you have to restore. I use a program called allway sync to create a replica to the external drive which also syncs deletions\modifications to a visioning folder

Chimp Paradox · 8 Dec 2014 at 15:50

Are you saying the crashplan recovery takes ages when backed to another local drive? I noticed it does something weird as opposed to just copying. Is that what you mean? The files aren't actually usable at the moment in the copy

bledd · 9 Dec 2014 at 09:03

This is what I'd do..

RAID1
Crashplan
Single hard drive backup

IE, add an external (non connected) hard drive that you do weekly backups on.

If it's data you need to keep, can never have too many backups.

syn3rgy · 9 Dec 2014 at 10:14

Chimp Paradox said:
Are you saying the crashplan recovery takes ages when backed to another local drive? I noticed it does something weird as opposed to just copying. Is that what you mean? The files aren't actually usable at the moment in the copy

Nope, blackup to crashplan as in "the cloud" not to a local drive. What i mean by slow (unless you were in the states) was if you had to recover from Crashplan (in the cloud) it would take ages to download everything again

so for me my backup works like this:

Local Computer HDD (In RAID) --- >Allways Sync to Synology --- > CrashPlan
|
| --- >Allways Sync to External Drive

Chimp Paradox · 9 Dec 2014 at 13:57

I should have made it clear that, in addition to using crashplan for the cloud, I also created a backup set with crashplan that copies to my other HDD, locally. It can do that too, but encrypt its somehow. I assume quick to restore?

That's what I mean when I said RAID1 which probably isn't technically RAID1.