I'm buying a NAS.

[awong]

That's it. I'm buying a NAS. I don't care that it's going to cost a boat load of money

Comments

[evan]

I've told you before, and I'll say it again. RAIDs protect against the wrong kind of failure.

Also, http://jwz.livejournal.com/801607.html

[awong]

yeah, I know. Cute post by jwz :)

I've been considering 4 failure modes in my setup.

1. You accidentally rm -rf ~ and need data back
   
2. 1 drive dies and you don't want downtime to restore from backup.
   
3. The computer takes out all its drives at once and you don't want to lose data.
   
4. The house burns down and you don't want to lose data.
   

For #1, I think snapshots are the way to go for protecting against it. Hence the LVM setup. IIRC, the ReadyNAS also provides this.

For #2, RAID is useful. I care about this mainly cause I'm leaving the area for a while. Robustness is also convenient since if you ever actually fully lose a replica, you're already in bad territory.

For #3, well, snapshots don't help. You really need an external backup system.

For #4, you need a backup that's offsite too.

I think having a NAS will help me take care of #1-3 w/o as much hassle. #4 is still still something I have to figure out a good way to do.

[evan]

By jwz's strategy, #2 is the same as #3 and both involve just swapping drives (something you'd need to do anyway when a RAID fails).

[jcbarker]

Hi, Devil's Advocate here again. If you're not going totally home-brew, why not just store your data, as the kids say, in the cloud with one of the mega-corps?

Oh, what's that you say? It's that kind of data? Ah, nevermind. I understand completely.

[awong]

ha ha ha

Actually, it's more that it's got financial data and whatnot. Not stuff I want online in plaintext.

And, actually, that in-the-cloud solution is pretty high on my list. I *was* writing my own, but I think I'm just going to give up and use brackup.