# IT's: Are you backing your servers up?



## Kitch (Apr 29, 2008)

A case study for fellow IT people...

At work, we had a server with a six-HDD RAID 5.  One of the drives failed, and we had to send for a replacement.

When we installed the new drive and rebuilt the RAID 5, we still lost data.

Fortunately, we had a tape backup for that server, and we were able to recover what we lost.

The moral of the story: Make sure your servers have a backup.  A RAID alone is no guarantee of data security or reliability.

If the data center that carried virtually all the Florida-based furry websites followed this, then they wouldn't be faced with possibly rebuilding everything from scratch.


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## net-cat (Apr 29, 2008)

No, my server isn't backed up.

But I also don't have any data I actually care about on my server.

My desktop machine, on the other hand...


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## Aurali (Apr 30, 2008)

Of course my stuff is backed up.. I'm not some amateur.. I just don't trust raid setups in their entirety.. especially with how easy it is to hack some things.


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## indrora (May 1, 2008)

if you count 
	
	



```
xcopy c:\work d:\work\$DATE\
```
 a backup, yes.


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## Ceceil Felias (May 1, 2008)

Once my server box is running, the extent of backups will be pathetically easy since there's nothing particularly sensitive, just some stuff that by recovering will make life much easier if something DOES fail. If I wanted to TRULY play with fate, I could probably even stick my old Bernoulli drive in and use that (especially since the tape drive my dad gave me has massive overheating problems and is thusly entirely unreliable, despite the larger-storage media it has).


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## WarMocK (May 2, 2008)

I wonder who ever came up with that urban legend that a RAID could replace an old-fashioned backup on a tape/DVD/MO/ZIP/JAZ-Drive/NAS etc ... Oo
RAID systems are meant to provide additional data security in order to fix minor data loss, but not as a backup for an entire system!
If you wanted to use RAID for a backup system that has a certain level of data security you'd need an entire cluster of harddrives (16+), however you still have problems with writing errors (they could be mirrored as well). In this case I'd rather prefer spending a few minutes to get a new tape/DVD/Blu-Ray for my drive and start a backup of the files that changed over the last week, and once in a while, I'd backup the entire system. If you do that frequently (once a week or so), the amount of data backed up is moderate. And come to think what time it will take to rebuild everything from scratch again .... well, I think it's worth spending that half an hour. ;-)


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## Ceceil Felias (May 4, 2008)

RAID was never meant to back up systems, it was designed to provide data integrity while giving lower access times as well due to the striping (a must for high-volume servers, of course). Backups are still heavily recommended in ANY situation, especially offsite ones.


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## DragonTrew (May 9, 2008)

True, RAID was meant to give you some minor security and performance to your data. If you wanna sleep well at night you NEED a reliable back-up system... On hight critical systems the back-up infrastructure is really complex, you HAVE to put your back-ups in other machine (tape/disk/whatever) geographically distant of the original site. Some even have an "copy" of everything in this remote site to provide redundancy. You simply can't ignore backing-up...

And... I do back-up all my machines if you're wondering...


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## squire (Jun 2, 2008)

Raid 6. 
Data snapshot and replication to another live data centre. 
Additional backup disk to disk to tape and shipped to yet another site. 
I think I've got it nice and tight.


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