Re: Self-destruct of btrfs RAID6 array

[Austin S Hemmelgarn <ahferroin7@gmail.com>]

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On 2015-11-19 23:11, Paul Loewenstein wrote:
> I have just had an apparently catastrophic collapse of a large RAID6
> array.  I was hoping that the dual-redundancy of a RAID6 array would
> compensate for having no backup media large enough to back it up!
Duncan already did a really good job of explaining this (and from what I 
can tell, I'm pretty sure his analysis of what's going on is correct), 
but I would like to add a couple of things.

First, RAID is not a backup, it's a way to minimize the need to restore 
from backups in the event of hardware failure (or, in the case of BTRFS, 
also a way to minimize the effects of data corruption).

Second, have you considered doing encrypted backups to a cloud storage 
service?  This is what I personally do, and it works really well for me. 
  Amazon S3 has pretty reasonable pricing, and there are multiple 
options on Linux to allow accessing it like a filesystem.  There are 
many other options as well (in my case, I backup to both S3 and Dropbox, 
but I also have small enough backups that I don't need to worry about 
the 1T limit on Dropbox for non-business accounts).


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