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NAS Raid question. Raid 1, 3, or 5.

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patrickl:
RAID 5 is indeed the most economical option for very large arrays. On the other hand, with disks being as big as they are these days, you could actually save a lot of money with a mirroring setup. RAID 5 is slower too and it can actually make you lose everything. For instance, if the RAID hardware breaks down you could lose all your data. Besides you can still have 2 disks breaking at about the same time. Sounds unlikely, but it actually happenend to me twice. I read a suggestion that it had to do with disks being from the same batch having a higher likelyhood of crashing after the same number of hours in use.

I use both. I use RAID 5 for the file servers, but I use mirroring on the workstations and webservers. I also use the mirroring for backup purposes. There are 2 identical disks in the computer and I have one spare. Every week I swap one of the mirrored disks for the spare one.

protokatie:
Thanks for the advice, guys. If I do go with RAID I am thinking I may stick with RAID 1.

I may even go to something much simpiler than RAID. Basically have a batch file that contains: XCOPY source dest /D /Y /V    and have it run every night. If I copy anything over to the file server that I MUST make sure is secure, I will just run the batch file after I do the file copy from my primary computer to make sure both disks have the same files. Yeah I know, kinda a ghetto way to do it, but this would be for Vids/music etc so if I lost a few movies it wouldnt kill me. It's not like I will be adding files every hour of every day, just the occassional dump from my main compy's media files to make room and allow for others on the network to access them (Like maybe once a week). Any ideas on this (very ghetto) route?

shmokes:
Memeo made a program that would synchronize folders over the network.  I can't remember what it was called, but it came with an old Maxtor OneTouch external hard drive I bought a long time ago.  I don't see the program on their website now.

Anyway, it wasn't strictly a backup program.  After the initial backup, files were only copied over that had been changed and the copy took place immediately, not at some predesignated time.  It constantly monitored the specified folders and instantly synchronized the folders across the network, so your data always stays secure.  A really cool feature of it, though, is that you could specify how many versions of a file you wanted to keep.  So, for example, if you told it to synchronize your My Documents folder with 5 versions, it wouldn't just keep a backup, but it would let you access any of the past 5 changes.  This is super useful for those times when you don't realize that there's a problem -- say, an important file went corrupt -- until long after you've replaced your good backup with the corrupt one.  Of course, this means that the program is constantly running in the background, but the little bastard was pretty much invisible.  It didn't use any appreciable amount of resources.

At any rate, I didn't have any use for it at the time, so didn't use it enough to vouch for its stability.  But what I saw seemed pretty cool.

orion:
http://dailycupoftech.com/windows-backup-with-rsync-and-freenas/  Is something like this what your getting at??

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