Raidcore - Backup Solution on the cheap?

[danv]

I don't know if anyone has considered it, but it seems like Raidcore's RC4852 drive roaming feature would make it an ideal candidate for a "cheap" backup solution for a small business.

RC4852 + 3 SATA Drives + 3 Rocketmate 1110 External Enclosures

You could run a Raid 0 or 5 across the three drives and be able to hotswap other sets of disks for your nightly backup. It's potentially cheaper then using a LTO2 tape drive depending on how big of rotation your running.

According to Raidcore's website the array configuration is stored on the drives themselves so there is theoretically no limit to the number of arrays you could define.

I'm not sure if this is unique to the RC4852 or not but I've always assumed most controllers store the raid configuration in the bios.

If nothing else it's fast and considerably more reliable then a tape. The Raid 5 option would even give you a redundant backup set.

Anyone doing this? I have a RC4852 on order but it's taking a while.

 

[sjonnie]

RAID arrays always store the configuration information on the drive itself so you could do that with any RAID controller.

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/myanandtech.html?member=114979" target="_new">My PCs</A> 😎

 

[jim552]

The drive roaming feature will not enable you to keep backups the way that you theorized.

Generally, rather than use external cases, I would use hot swap drive bays. (But for home use external can make sense too.)

The feature that exists in Raidcore that will enable you to use drives as backups is going to be the Regular old Mirroring, and Mirror Splitting and Hiding. (That is their recommended online approach. See their "Highly Extendable Data Protection and Recovery" PDF the explains the details.)

Personally I have used "Mirroring" on Servers, and workstations, as a backup tool for a long time.

On the production servers I have, I generally keep life relatively simple. (First off, they are ALL based on the same hardware configuration.)

Volumes are just mirrored, and the server has a OS/Program/Swap File volume, and one or more network volume(s).

I ALWAYS keep a couple of drives that have the "AS INSTALLED OS" configuration. Just the OS and drivers. That way if I need to boot up in a generic "KNOWN GOOD" mode, I can use that drive. (Also have backups of the drive itself as well. Usually DVD.)

Then about once a quarter, or prior to a significant change, I will hotswap one of the OS drives and put in a spare to remirror to. I'll reserve that drive as a "LAST GOOD DRIVE".

This way I can easily reboot the server if the OS gets damaged. Data drives I usually backup to an online Hard Drive that is not mirrored, and then back that up to tape. (That way the backup window is much shorter.)

There are, of course, procedures that need to be followed to make sure that you don't shoot your foot!
1 - Don't use a "LAST GOOD DRIVE" on a different
server box and startup two identical servers
on the same network!
2 - In Windows 2000 don't boot up with an old copy
that might try to update active directory!

The things to watch out for are dependent on network and server configurations, but those are a couple of examples.