General NAS questions

[makowb]

First off, let me tell you what I have (don't have the funds for a standalone NAS):

An old desktop with:
AMD 2600+
Old Mobo w/2 sata150 connectors and a raid 0/1 controller
2 x 1tb sata drives and 1x120gb ATA 133 drive
2.5gb of DDR400 RAM
Legitimate copies of Windows Vista Business, XP Pro, XP Home, Windows Server 2003 and 2008

What I want to use it for:
I have a brand new macbook that I want to interface with it (don't really care about time machine) that will be running both Mac OS X and Windows XP.
Mainly keep massive amounts of hd and sd movies and tv shows on it. Eventually buy a media extender to stream media off of it.
Backup documents, ISOs for programs, pictures, and music (probably take up 50-100gb max.
Use it to download things via Bit Torrent

So, as far as I understood, RAID 1 with mirroring made it so all data was backed up, but from reading briefly through these forums, that's not the case. The reason I have the 2 x 1tb drives is so that I can have 1tb of data with one drive with the other drive purely for back up.

So, sorry for my noobishness, but what's my best option? Personally, I like having XP Pro so that I can remote to it easily via my macbook and start new torrents and stuff, but if you guys think that there is a better solution for me, then please let me know. I just would not like to do a lot of work in order to salvage any data if something bad did happen.

I will have an N/gigabit router in the near future and this box will be tossed into my closet with nothing but an ethernet and power cable plugged in. Help please?

 

[thiggins]

Perfectly fine to use Windows as a server/NAS.

But RAID is not backup. If the mobo dies, both drives could be toast.

Make sure you put the NAS on a UPS and keep backups of critical files on DVD or an online storage site.

 

[drbiggly]

I agree that RAID is not backup. Though the question begs, how does one use a singular box in order to back up their data? My feeling on it is this: RAID is a level of protection, but with a single part failure (RAID controller card, or motherboard in the case of most on-board RAID controllers which I personally feel are pretty dangerous without extra spare motherboards lying around) a full data corruption can occur.

I use a seemingly strange sounding, but a surprisingly effective method. First, I take two drives of whatever brand, model configuration, etc. Roughly the same space (but don't have to be.) Format them individually. I have a standard XP build on a separate hard drive, so there are 3 drives for this type of setup: Boot/OS drive, and two data drives.

I just use one as a data drive and the other as a backup to the data drive, albeit internal to one machine. I use a simple program to daily (or more frequently depending upon the case) copy the data from the primary to the reserved/redundant data drive. And that is it. I suppose one could use the 'dynamic' drive type in Windows and do a software RAID, but I've had these setups go completely bad on me and corrupt the data on both drives, so I can't say I recommend it in full confidence. RSYNC can be setup on Windows boxes but Syncback works quite well for my purposes (since I'm using Windows); really any good software can do this depending on what OS one is using.

For a further measure, I do this again to another system thus that if the primary system goes down, I don't even have to pull a drive out to get to data that I might need over the course of the next few days while I get the system back up and running.

I think that this sort of method would work fine in the case of the original poster for the following reasons:
1) No dependence upon an on-board RAID controller.
2) This can be OS independent; Windows isn't necessary but is certainly simple. Linux works well too; I've done this (though with less success for me personally and some issues that I won't go into here.)
3) Having a program that will sync the data on a daily/12-hour/6-hour, etc basis means that if a drive failure does occur, it's going to be noticed by the sync program. Read failures will occur if it is the primary of the two data drives, and write failures will occur if it is the secondary.

I've used this method for a number of years with good success and have yet to lose any data as long as I followed the setup. Whenever I have tried other methods, I have either lost data or had issues. I recommend any synchronizing/backup program that will email whenever file errors occur; this allows you to know that you likely have a drive failure or some other critical error without having to worry about specialized RAID monitoring software, etc.

Another benefit is that when one drive inevitably does die, one can use a completely different drive rather than trying in vain to hunt down an exact match for a drive model that may no longer exist. Why? Because to the OS/MB/BIOS/etc, there is nothing in 'RAID' and thus they are all treated as independent drives. This offers a level of absolute simplicity down to the way the drive is formatted; e.g. no fancy block-level striping or parity, etc. Just a copy of the data.

The goal is hands-off and redundancy. Using the method I described above, not only is it hands-off once setup, it has redundancy, and it also has simplicity. Half the case melt down? No problem. Pull the drive out and put it in a USB enclosure temporarily; it's not hard to find an OS to read a single drive. Plus the benefit of a reasonably quick data transfer rate on the newer drives as there is no RAID overhead to worry about for writing data. I just schedule my sync/backup times for when I'm not home or not awake. Note that if the MB dies and an OS reinstall is necessary, the data drives can be simply disconnected and, wipe the smaller OS drive, reinstall from scratch, and just redo user permissions/shares/etc and it is good to go again. Data drives get reconnected and things go back online. This goes for any major component problem or failure that requires massive changes that an OS would get upset about and require a fresh install on.

Note that I have gone yet another step further and do online-backup in order to further hedge my bets.

-Biggly

 

[thiggins]

Sounds like you have a proven method that works for you. So, uh, why are you looking to change?

 

[drbiggly]

Who me? Oh I'm not looking to change anything; I was trying to give an answer to the original poster's question. Though that response was more longwinded that I had intended. Thing is, given my somewhat unconventional setup, I get a lot of derision over it and was trying to head off the typical arguments against it as I think it would suit the original poster's request pretty well. Though most of the time the arguments against my setup usually are countered with arguments like "That's stupid! You should use onboard RAID! RAID is so much better!"

-Biggly

 

[thiggins]

Who me? Oh I'm not looking to change anything; I was trying to give an answer to the original poster's question.

Yikes! My apologies. That's why I get for trying to answer posts first thing in the morning.

Thanks for your very detailed and helpful reply,drbiggly!

 

[drbiggly]

Anytime. Love the site!

On an unrelated note, I saw your blurb about a NAS possibly incorporating Mozy onto it (best of all worlds really IMO) and thus I emailed Mozy about it. They said that they knew of nothing, but if they did then they likely wouldn't know until it was already public knowledge...so no help there.

I didn't find out about Mozy until some sales guys from EMC paid us a visit one day and happened to mention it. We didn't get any EMC NAS/SAN devices (we had already gone to StoreVault by then) but the bit about Mozy has been great. I've been using some 'free' accounts for non mission critical systems and a full Home account for my home PC, which contains a ton of data. At this rate, I'll likely be continually uploading to Mozy for the next several months as I have currently gone for about 6 at this point with nearly continual uploading. Yet another reason why I hedge my bets on files so much at home; the 'NAS' is really a simple/low power PC that I sync files from on a daily basis to a single large drive in my main PC so that I can use a single MozyHome account to send it all to the cloud.


-Biggly

 

[thiggins]

It's just a matter of time before a consumer NAS maker integrates "cloud" backup. Now that EMC has absorbed Iomega, they would certainly be the logical choice. But the ix2 (review will be up at end of week) currently just bundles a free standalone Mozy account. So they're not ready yet...

 

[00Roush]

I would say using your old computer with Win XP Pro would work just fine. I actually used a similar setup for my home server a couple of years ago. It worked great. The only reason I upgraded was because I needed faster network transfer speeds than were possible using the PCI bus.

The backup method described above sounds like a good option. The only thing that I might change would be to move the backup drive to an external hard drive enclosure that connects via USB 2.0. This might make for slower backups but allows the backup data to be moved to another computer very easily in the event of a failure.

00Roush

 

[makowb]

thanks!

Very informative drbiggly, I'll try that stuff out over the weekend if I have time.

So here's two more questions. First, you sound like you were using a very specific backing up program that had a lot of cool features (email alerts.) What exactly was this program so you can save me searching for it =p.

Also, I currently have stuff on my RAIDed hard drives that I don't want to lose (seeing as my external died pretty much on it's last transfer to them). I don't have any space really on any other hard drives, how can I disconnect them from the RAID without corrupting the data? Like I said, it's a hardware RAID that is working and windows sees it fine. Do I simply go into the raid controller and remove them or is it more complicated? Any help?

 

[drbiggly]

Ooh, that's the tough part. If it is already in RAID, then to make them 'single' drives again (typically) requires somewhere to offload the data to. You said that your external drive died last time a transfer was attempted; perhaps now is the time to replace the external?

The program I use is called Syncback, which can be found at: http://www.2brightsparks.com I only use the standard version but that does plenty of what I need. I will say this though: TEST how you setup your folders if you have a more complex routine. I have accidentally deleted data by pointing it at the wrong folder before for backup (oops!).

There is a case where if the drives were in RAID 1 that one could pull the drive and connect it as a single, see if the data is readable. My way to test would be this: Shut down the system that has the RAID'd drives in it. Take one of the drives and connect it to another system as an auxiliary drive. This will tell you whether or not you would conceivably have to reformat. In the interest of full disclosure I can say that there is a possibility that you can corrupt data on a drive even by just connecting it, but it is a pretty low possibility. Note that this only works in RAID1 setups.


I did like the suggestion by 00Roush that one could 'sync' or backup to an external drive rather than another internal drive. I have several machines so it's easier for me to leave it internal due to space constraints than to have an external floating around, but definitely a good idea that I hadn't thought of!

-Biggly

 

[Dennis Wood]

The best backup up solutions have a few things in common:

1. They use redundant hardware.
2. The backup is offsite
3. The backup is unattended
4. The backup is tested and checked regularly.

If you have a business and home location, and reasonably fast internet speeds, then the answer becomes very simple. Purchase two NAS units that offer rsync capabilities, ideally over SSH. In this case you could actually backup home data to the business NAS and business data to the home NAS. Check the logs weekly to ensure the jobs are running OK, and check the data itself weekly to make sure the files are there.

If you're backing up workstations, use a hardware independent "bare metal restore" product like Storagecraft and store workstation images on the NAS. These images can be backed up to an external esata drive (instead of rsync) once every few weeks, keeping in mind that critical data is being rsync'd at your chosen schedule. Storagecraft uses a boot CD that gets you into a Vista environment (that you can add storage and network drivers to "live") and allows recovery directly over gigabit from the NAS unit.

If one NAS unit fails outright, you've got the second one to rely on in an emergency while you recover data. All bases covered, no licensing fees, no storage costs and relatively inexpensive to implement.