Re: Is My Data DESTROYED?!

[adfas asd <chimera_god@yahoo.com>]

For those of you who don't follow the list closely, we have gone over this same old ground several times already.

- Of course I know that RAID is not quite as good as backup. 
- Of course I wish that backing up could save many terabytes of data for less than $10,000.  But that is not practical today.

Fact:  I have terabytes of data that I want to keep from losing.
Fact:  Disk drives have never been cheaper.
Fact:  It is most cost-effective to save terabytes of data on disk drives, if the proper regimen can be determined for safety.
Fact:  After one month's use mdadm RAID has resulted in a failure which could have been catastrophic had I not determined that somehow JFS functionality was destroyed.
Fact:  Now one of my  arrays has gone into degraded mode for mysterious reasons, and we are so busy arguing about backups that no one can advise on what to do about this.


--- On Fri, 10/23/09, Mattias Wadenstein <maswan@acc.umu.se> wrote:

> From: Mattias Wadenstein <maswan@acc.umu.se>
> Subject: Re: Is My Data DESTROYED?!
> To: "Christian Pernegger" <pernegger@gmail.com>
> Cc: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org, "adfas asd" <chimera_god@yahoo.com>
> Date: Friday, October 23, 2009, 1:57 PM
> On Fri, 23 Oct 2009, Christian
> Pernegger wrote:
> 
> >> I believe you are confusing raid with backup.
> > 
> > For lots of people the primary role of RAID is as a
> protection against
> > data-loss nowadays. Backups just aren't
> feasible/cost-effective
> > anymore for the amounts of data involved. Sticking
> your head in the
> > sand and repeating that mantra doesn't change that and
> it isn't
> > helping.
> 
> Well, claiming that RAID will protect your data under all
> circumstances isn't helping either. Backups will actually
> protect against such things as rm -rf:ing the wrong
> directory or mkfs:ing the wrong device, etc. Things that
> RAID will never protect against.
> 
> And I don't see how backups aren't feasable, USB/network
> harddrives keep pace with in-box harddrive sizes just fine.
> Offsite backup might be trickier/costlier, so you might
> constrain those to just the data that you would be really
> sad to see gone if the house burns down (photo album, own
> creations, etc).
> 
> /Mattias Wadenstein
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe
> linux-raid" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
>