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Talking about backups

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Who needs backups?

My parents went on a holiday to Europe last year. My father had a new Digital SLR and on the last day in Italy, just before they were about to return to Australia, it was stolen. If he had backed up his photos on to a laptop, for example, he would have them now. The camera is replaceable but the photos were not.

I am sure everyone has a story about lost data.

Everyone needs backups.

So how can you backup a file server when the amount of data far exceeds any backup media you can afford?

Get a second file server?

In my case I make sure the stuff I do not want to lose is backed up. Pictures, media that would be hard to replace or take a lot of effort and time to reproduce (I spent nearly a year converting LPs - vinyl - to digital form) and scanned documents are all backed up to external disks and onto DVDs.

I think my family have the message now. One of my sisters has bought a 1TB external drive and a 320GB portable disk for off site backups. My mother has a 500GB external drive. Now what they need is a backup strategy.

Several weeks ago one of the disks in my file server failed. It took several days to get a replacement and during that time the RAID-5 ran in degraded mode. I have now added a hot spare so if one drive fails it will automatically switch to using the spare. I also have a cold spare available. As long as there is no fire!

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