[SGVLUG] scary RAID 5 going going .. soon 2 be gone?

[Zack, James]

I hope that's not 10Tb on IDE/ATA drives! (tick, tick, tick) 

Your cheapest solution might be another 10Tb of disks and unless there
is an open source dedupe solution out there.  Commercial dedupe is too
expensive for home/hobby use.  My Google-Fu turned up this open source
solution:

http://gotitsolutions.org/2007/01/15/open-source-backup-and-data-de-dupl
ication-virtual-appliance-2.html

I have not tried it, and it's not clear if this is a file level dedupe
or a block level one, and if it's pre or post process, nor what the
compression ratio is, and it looks like it only works with SMB :/

-----Original Message-----
From: sgvlug-bounces at sgvlug.net [mailto:sgvlug-bounces at sgvlug.net] On
Behalf Of Matt Campbell
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2009 1:59 PM
To: 'SGVLUG Discussion List.'
Subject: Re: [SGVLUG] scary RAID 5 going going .. soon 2 be gone?

Does anyone want to do a meeting on backups?  I would find it useful!

I have a 10T array at home I would hate to lose, and I know of no
reasonably priced backup for it.  I was counting on the RAID to protect
things....

Matt

> -----Original Message-----
> From: sgvlug-bounces at sgvlug.net [mailto:sgvlug-bounces at sgvlug.net] On 
> Behalf Of Claude Felizardo
> Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2009 5:02 PM
> To: SGVLUG Discussion List.
> Subject: Re: [SGVLUG] scary RAID 5 going going .. soon 2 be gone?
> 
> On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 9:26 PM, matti <mathew_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > well not quite, however you want to read this article
> >
> > summary:
> > As Hard Drives get larger, and unrecoverable read error (URE) rate 
> > remains about the same, the chances of being able to recover from a 
> > disk drive failure on a RAID 5 system goes down (i.e failure rate
> increases )...
> > so much so that you may expect to not be able to reliably recover.
> >
> > scary math, especially considering what a PITA it is to backup large
> amounts of data.
> >
> > Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009
> > http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162
> >
> > best
> > matti
> 
> Yeah, this article and a bunch of articles warning about RAID came out

> in 2007 and it's been on my mind since I use both RAID-1 and 5 
> partitions in my fileserver at home.  Most of my important stuff is 
> backed up on other computers but there's quite a bit of stuff I 
> wouldn't want to lose but is it's kinda difficult to backup 
> automatically such as my favorite TiVo recordings.  I've had various 
> failures over the years that either took the system down completely or

> just the big RAID partitions.  It's a pain to rebuild since it 
> requires commands you type in only once in a while and it takes so 
> darn long to run that I've been contemplating moving my data to an 
> external network device.
> 
> Right now I've got three 500 GB SATA drives partitioned as follows:
> three RAID-1 w/ hot spare on different disks for /boot, / and /alt 
> (same size as the 2nd for previous/next OS install) and one big giant
> RAID-5 with LVM for /home, /export (my shared files and /.private for 
> the rsnapshot backups)  Yeah, I really would like something like ZFS 
> for the flexibility of resizing partitions and snapshotting.
> 
> At this point, would I be better off adding a 4th drive as a hot spare

> or rebuild for RAID-6 for protection against data loss in case a 2nd 
> drive dies while rebuilding?  Actually are there tools to convert
> RAID-5 into RAID-6?
> 
> Has anyone looked into any of those online backup services?  Looks 
> like there's Mozy or Carbonite?  I assume they don't support Linux 
> partitions so can you configure these things to backup your network 
> shares as well?  Assuming you want to spend the days to back things up

> initially...
> 
> What about those 1-touch backup drives from the various drive 
> manufacturers?  Does anything support Linux w/ 1-touch so it will get 
> done?  Right now I have to plug in an external drive, mount the 
> various partitions and copy stuff manually, disconnect, etc.  During 
> the summer or at least during heat waves I have to use an external fan

> blowing on both the fileserver and external  drive box because these 
> things get hot when you run them for hours at a time.
> 
> claude