Safe storage of important data
 

Hi there,

I was thinking about how you people securely store your data. What I mean if you use any kind of technique like RAID to protect your data from hardware failure. The question also includes protection of other physical media, like optical discs (CD, DVD, etc.)

Me for examples stores all original audio discs in a place where the discs have no direct contact to sunlight. The place has low temperature and humidity is reasonable. I don't have any backups of my original discs but I handle them very carefully and only lend them to people I know have the same respect for music like me.

Lately I was thinking about my digitalized music archive which is currently stored on a single 320GB PATA drive. The drive is contained in a noise-blocker box which also enlarges the surface of the drive. This leads to a very cool drive and almost no noise from the mechnical parts. So the drive is definitely not going to die because of too much heat.
But everyone knows that harddrives have the habit of failing when you really the data or when they store data you really care for.

Currently the machine the drive is installed in is running the smartd daemon from the smartmontools package. Look up SMART in the Wikipedia if you're not familiar with the concept. smartd monitors the drive and writes critical changes to a logfile which I check randomly. It also sends me an email if the drive is nearing its death.
Of course this doesn't always help because drive can also die of sudden death *g*

What I'm planning now is to upgrade my diskspace. I'm going to move the 320GB with noise-blocker box into another system, replacing a smaller drive (120 GB). I have an external PATA enclosure, so the 120GB is going to replace the currently installed 80GB in the external one. I'm not sure what to do with the 80GB one, either to the spare parts or in the trash bin.

The new drive(s) is going to be a 750GB one, and at least two of them so I can setup a RAID1. Which means that one drive can fail completly without loosing any data.

Does anyone have experience with such a setup?

liquid

I just separate drive everything, then backup/junk what I don't need/want.

if you don't want that 80GB, I'll buy it from you.

You really want a drive that is already quite old and could fail in a few months? I'm always very cautious about buying used hardware, especially when it comes to harddrives.

And even when, assuming you're living in the US, shipping could probably outweigh the pure value of the drive :D

Yeah, you're right.

Aren't magnetic tapes the best way to store media? Although not for commercial use, they're used for backups and archiving, right? Why not get one if you're that concerned of data loss?

amazon seem to be doing dirt cheap memory, 500gig for £76, last time i checked, the US amazon'll be even cheaper, probably.

I think that these days, the best backup is an offline HD that mirrors everything you've got on your online drive. I've never trusted RAID, not because of personal experience, but just because I've known 3 people who lost everything on their RAID setup due to some kind of unexplained data corruption.

I have an offline mirror of my music files, though it's a few months out of date. I will also soon have a completely offsite mirror, too.

Aiming for at least 750GB, 500GB is a bit too low taking into account that the 320GB drive is nearly full. I only hope the reiserfs can handle such large partition sizes without performance degradation...

@Vemp: I don't think I want to invest a huge amount of money into a tape streamer device (these things cost a lot). And I really don't have time to go through the manual backup procedure each time sometime on the filesystem changes. Software RAID1 is cheap, very reliable and perfectly safe assuming the two drives don't fail on the exact same date. Linux monitoring functionality for RAID devices is very advanced and provides at lot of techniques to warn the user when the RAID devices are out of sync.

Backuping to optical media is out of question because
a) DVD5 is too small with the <5GB capacity
b) DVD9 is too expensive for the capacity it provides
c) HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are too expensive in general

Additional Spam:
Was that some kind of hardware-driven RAID? Maybe with a windows setup? Because I haven't heard of any such story on a linux software RAID.

Also data loss because of corruption is very unlikely in a RAID1 (notice the 1) setup because corruption has to occur on both volumes at the same time. Also you can always mount each volume separate from the other (that's not the case with RAID0 which I don't intend to setup).