On 8/5/2020 5:25 PM, deloptes wrote:
Jonathan Dowland wrote:For the majority of use-cases, I really disagree that RAID is ever more essential than backup. I can cook up some scenarios where this isn't true, but they are not common ones.And I disagree with you,
So do I. Both are essential, and without both, sooner or later there is going to be a very significant problem.
because if you do not have RAID, you loose the data instantly and in best case your backup is a few hours old.
Not only that, the system is simply unavailable until the file are restored. This can take hours or even days.
Plus you have the effort to restore probably the last monthly, then the last weekly and then few incrementals - compared to replacing just one disk and letting it resync.
If that. On my large arrays, I keep a hot spare disk online, so the resynch starts the moment a disk fails.
In general I agree with you that both are essential, but if someone asks me I definitely recommend RAID and in addition the backup. This means if you want to be able to restore let's say yesterdays version of a file.
Exactly. RAID does not protect against Oops. Backups do, at least toa reasonable extent.
True backup is very costly if you want to do it the proper way.
Well, there are solutions that are both economical and effective. They tend to require more work on the part of the admin, though. I mean, it would be really, really nice to buy a Quantum tape drive for $10K and change, I definitely cannot afford it. I have a ton of older hard drives pulled from the arrays during upgrades sitting around doing nothing, however. Their use as backup media costs nothing.