[TriLUG] New system configuration thoughts

[Alan Porter]

> Yeah, I don't get this.  I understand the whole machine could fry and
> I'd lose data, but wouldn't RAID 1 be more useful than not backing up to
> a second disk.

Yes, RAID can be seen as "continuously backing up".  But RAID's strength 
is that it insures against hardware failures, and it recovers without a 
lot of downtime.  The strength of backups comes from their snapshot-like 
behavior (every night, every hour, etc).  They insure against user 
errors or filesystem corruption, but may take longer to recover.

At my office, RAID is the way to go.  We can not afford to have machines 
offline while a disk is replaced.  So we use software RAID1 under Linux.

At home, backups are more appropriate.  Personally, I use "backuppc", 
which makes backups of every machine in my house every night.  It pools 
and compressed files, keeps multiple backups, sends email alerts when 
things go wrong, and it works with Windows and Linux clients.

Many people say that you should use BOTH.  But that depends on your 
application.  For me, I've found that backuppc running on a hand-me-down 
PC is appropriate for my home network.


Alan






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