NAS died. get data from RAID0?

Soldato
OP
Joined
23 Oct 2002
Posts
3,177
to be honest ive used backup exec at the old place and its a horrible bit of s/w. i just backup using explorer over night.

all we do now is a nightly backup to my machine, then i backup to an external HDD in the day, that i take home in the evening. that way we normally have 3 sets of the same data and 1 set being offsite (in case of fire)

offsite backup is very OTT for a company where there are only 3 people in normally.
 
Don
Joined
21 Oct 2002
Posts
46,744
Location
Parts Unknown
How big and what filetype are the files you're using?

If you need daily backups, create a 7za script that will create a complete backup of specific folders and shrink them right down if they're compressible files.


-Non compressible? Robocopy them to a network location
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
23 Oct 2002
Posts
3,177
general files i guess. outlook OST files. office docs and our web apps (mysql etc)

they backup fine overnight so ive not see any real need to compress. compression can also have its own issues.

for me its literally copying 1 folder containing all our data on a nightly basis, then my dev environment and the live. all while not in use.

i have thought of robocopy but with win7 copying isnt the ballache it used to be.
 
Soldato
Joined
24 Jan 2007
Posts
14,065
Location
.
eh? where did £40 come from?

a nas with mirror and striped is around £600.

of course we make more than £40 a day :rolleyes:
I have a WD 4TB NAS (2x 2TB drives) which cost £300 and it as mirror and striped options

capturecm.png
 
Soldato
Joined
22 Dec 2008
Posts
10,370
Location
England
year or so ago 1tb drives were £40 each... why didnt they upgrade :/

Wow. A day's labour is worth less than £40? That's a ridiculous way to operate. Fire your accountants

eh? where did £40 come from?

a nas with mirror and striped is around £600.

of course we make more than £40 a day :rolleyes:

Straight quote from Diagro. You had a 4 disk raid 0 to store data on. You could instead have had a two disk raid 1, with the same capacity, for the extortionate cost of £80. Then when a disk died, you'd have been fine. Or pushed data to a 1tb single drive every five minutes or so, if £80 is too much but £40 is OK.

Now a disk has failed. A days work is gone. Yet it appears there's no intention to avoid this happening in the future. If you're paying staff £10 an hour, your labour cost is comfortably £20 p/h after looking at NI, holidays, people making tea and so forth. There's no way raid 1 is more expensive than the labour lost when the raid 0 system goes down.

edit: At the risk of saying something constructive, look into ZFS as a file system. Either Solaris of FreeBSD. No file corruption. Transparent, on the fly compression. Many redundancy options. It's really very, very good.
you have never had compressed files get corrupted? i have... as i say space isnt an issue so i dont see the point really
 
Last edited:
Soldato
OP
Joined
23 Oct 2002
Posts
3,177
"Yet it appears there's no intention to avoid this happening in the future"

yet i have said a million times (exaggerated lol) than i am now using raid1/5 (cant remember which)... 2x 1tb drives raided up to provide 1tb with redundancy. should be fine.

we would have bought a new NAS as this buffalo thing was a pain in the arse anyway ;)

one of the account ladies is an owner, so on a lot more than £10 a hour. luckily she had spent most of the day doing something else :) as had the other one. lucky they werent busy!

anyway, cheers for the advice...
 
Man of Honour
Joined
13 Oct 2006
Posts
90,821
Most decent NAS can do remote replication of some form or another (rsync, etc.) - strongly reccomend using it - it never ever makes sense to not invest in your backup solution as a business. I'm not a big fan of RAID even in the most redundant of forms - my current setup never has more than 2 discs mirroring and then they are realtime synced to a standard NTFS format USB drive connected to the NAS (slightly slows down transfer rates but nothing that would be an issue for a small to medium size company) this almost entirely works around the problems when the RAID array or RAID controller hardware entirely fails (which happens about as frequently as an entire single disc failure anyhow). The only issue then is if the data is corrupt on the original disc and gets synced over the good data on the external drive so I also use the USB copy feature on any good NAS to take seperate backups at regular intervals.

For a medium to large company you probably want to be looking at using the rsync or similiar feature to keep a redundant server running an upto date copy of the files to minimise any disruption to business.


EDIT: Assuming you have all 4 discs running ok without remounting them in the same NAS or using specialised recovery software the chances of recovering the data from a RAID0 array is very slim - even rebuying the exact same NAS isn't a guarantee as even the slightlest version change to the controller used can result in it being unable to see a stripe written by a different version in all too many cases.
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
20 Feb 2007
Posts
4,501
Location
‎ツ
I'm not going to bang on about using a RAID 0 array for backup purposes, although it really did make me LOL!!

If you're after a good bit of software that can be scheduled as well as doing incremental backups have a look at EaseUS Todo backup - link. It's free too ;)
 
Associate
Joined
22 Aug 2004
Posts
462
Location
East Sussex
I have a WD 4TB NAS (2x 2TB drives) which cost £300 and it as mirror and striped options

capturecm.png

WD Should be shot if they use that kind of language for (I understand that this isnt the old drive, but cant be that dissimilar)

'how should you organise your disks?'
'EPIC SPEED AND HARD DRIVE SPACE????!?!?!' [Raid0]
'Probably a bit safer BUT SLOW AS HECK' [Raid1]

If you had no idea what raid was, what would you choose?

I've had a couple of mishaps with Raid0 in my time, but I still use it in my desktop. Providing you back up properly and know the risks, its a nice speedboost to have imo.
 
Soldato
Joined
24 Jan 2007
Posts
14,065
Location
.
WD Should be shot if they use that kind of language for (I understand that this isnt the old drive, but cant be that dissimilar)

'how should you organise your disks?'
'EPIC SPEED AND HARD DRIVE SPACE????!?!?!' [Raid0]
'Probably a bit safer BUT SLOW AS HECK' [Raid1]

If you had no idea what raid was, what would you choose?

I've had a couple of mishaps with Raid0 in my time, but I still use it in my desktop. Providing you back up properly and know the risks, its a nice speedboost to have imo.
I get the same transfer rate with ether setting.. remember the WD nas are limited to the GigaEthernet
 
Soldato
Joined
10 Oct 2005
Posts
8,706
Location
Nottingham
"Yet it appears there's no intention to avoid this happening in the future"

yet i have said a million times (exaggerated lol) than i am now using raid1/5 (cant remember which)... 2x 1tb drives raided up to provide 1tb with redundancy. should be fine.

If you have two 1TB disk and they are configured to provide redundancy with 1TB usable space then you are using RAID1 (mirroring). RAID5 is normally used with 3 or more disks.

But, please remember that have redundancy through a RAID configuration does not negate the requirement for backups (and unless you check that you can restore from them then really you have no backups).
 
Soldato
Joined
19 Oct 2006
Posts
3,708
it was a 1TB NAS. pity that was made up of 4 crappy WD 250gb drives!

I know its pretty academic now but as a minimum it should have been configured for RAID5 parity giving 750GB of usable storage and would have been able to survive a disk failure. As others have mentioned using RAID0 will only ever increase your chances of data loss over even a single drive.
 
Man of Honour
Joined
13 Oct 2006
Posts
90,821
I know its pretty academic now but as a minimum it should have been configured for RAID5 parity giving 750GB of usable storage and would have been able to survive a disk failure. As others have mentioned using RAID0 will only ever increase your chances of data loss over even a single drive.

I would dispute that tho I have no hard statistics to back it up - I've seen single discs, entire RAID0 arrays and stupidly redundant RAID5, etc. arrays fail entirely about as commonly as each other. (Not that I'd use that as a basis to say running RAID0 isn't such a bad idea). But its why I go to the effort to setup my arrays to be realtime mirrored via software to an out of stripe disc thats using NTFS or another standard filesystem.
 
Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
26,053
You're a lot more likely to lose a RAID0 array than a RAID5 unless you lose a controller, but if you're doing anything important without dual-ported disks and dual controllers then you're not doing your job properly.

Also with disk sizes getting to where they are I wouldn't pick RAID5, you'll lose another disk in the time it takes to rebuild the array. RAID6 at a minimum.

Obviously you back up in addition to having redundancy on your storage, the most elaborate redundancy in the world won't stop you accidentally deleting something.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom