My new Cheapo Slimserver Boxen

[Jason Holtzapple]

--- Jason <jason (AT) pagefamily (DOT) net> wrote:

> Even with software mirroring of the hard drives I would be inclined to
> continue backing up your stuff periodically to another hard drive or DVD-R,
> etc.

I prefer to use a "cold" mirror and keep the spare drive(s) unmounted
most of the time. This keeps usage of one mirror down and allows for
quick restores in between sync times.

I've used setups like this at home, where uptime isn't important, for
10 years or so and I've never lost data. *knock on wood*

--Jason

[Jack Coates]

My new Cheapo Slimserver Boxen

> The inherent risk in this strategy is that if you suffer some sort of
> problem with the motherboard or disk controllers (or power supply) then
> you
> will potentially lose all of your data. I have a friend with a similar
> strategy to yours and so far he has been lucky too... However, hard disks
> are cheap. I have a $90 160GB external USB 2 hard drive that I
> periodically
> sync all of my important data to. It's on an entirely different system,
> different circuit in the house, etc.
>

but if your house falls down...

it's all about risk levels. The risk level of a power surge frying
everything in the box is higher than that of an IDE controller corrupting
an unmounted disk, &c.

To return to point zero, the risk level of filesystem corruption or an
accidental rm -rf damaging a soft mirror is relatively high. By the way,
I'd advise anyone using soft RAID on Linux to write a script that monitors
the state of /proc/mdstat, and/or use smartd. I've seen a number of soft
RAID systems fail to notify the administrators that disks had dropped out
of mirror until it was too late.

--
Jack At Monkeynoodle.Org: It's A Scientific Venture...
"Believe what you're told; there'd be chaos if everyone thought for
themselves." -- Top Dog hotdog stand, Berkeley, CA

[Jack Coates]

My new Cheapo Slimserver Boxen

> How does smartd work?

http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

good news, Macintosh support.

Modern harddisks report their pre-failure statistics and warnings to the
OS... smartd is a daemon that logs status messages and mails you if things
are really going south. It's always given me enough warning to get a
backup, and once I even got enough warning to replace the failing disk.
--
Jack At Monkeynoodle.Org: It's A Scientific Venture...
"Believe what you're told; there'd be chaos if everyone thought for
themselves." -- Top Dog hotdog stand, Berkeley, CA