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chipy

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 25, 2012
2
0
hey all, i'm setting up a backup system for a small business and they want a 3x mirror backup system. in other words they want to have 1 master drive 3 clones of that drive for super backup and fail-safeness. They also was the 3 clones so that at any point in time they are able to take out 1 of the clones, while still having atleast 2 backups, and put it in a safety deposit box

now i don't know RAID systems to well but best i can make out that can be achived using RAID 1 and a RAID controller that supports multiple images

question 1: is RAID 1 the right thing or am i needing some kind of RAID 0+1 hybrid thing?

question 2: is the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2* controller able to support multiple mirrors of one drive?



* OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MEQX2T4.0S/
 
Wouldn't it be easier to set up this as four independent usb-drives (or similar) which are used as a target from a software such as carbon copy-cloner or Superduper! ? Then you can remove any drive without hassle, put it somewhere else without trouble. You could even (and should) have one or several of the drives on geographically different positions, to prevent data loss from fire etc.
 
Wouldn't it be easier to set up this as four independent usb-drives (or similar) which are used as a target from a software such as carbon copy-cloner or Superduper! ? Then you can remove any drive without hassle, put it somewhere else without trouble. You could even (and should) have one or several of the drives on geographically different positions, to prevent data loss from fire etc.

The caveat is that this won't be real-time protection. I guess the simplest thing here would be to set up a two drive RAID 1 so the data is always protected and then schedule a clone job with an app like CCC to run every couple of minutes and clone the contents to backup drive 2 and 3. I think there is a scheduler in CCC, but I don't remember off hand now.

Of course, one can always resort to using rsync from the terminal, since that is what CCC is doing in the background, and cron to run the rsync job automatically.
 
re

ok thanx guys, really i'm looking at options, i really want to have this setup done without and software needed to interact or keep the system running.

I set you a similar system using the Sans TowerRAID model. but i never did more that 100% redundancy AKA idk if it could do 3 complete clones because all i did was RAID 1.

only their website [ http://www.sansdigital.com/towerraid/index.php ] i see some models show as "clone" in the mode section just like RAID 1,2,5,10 does that mean what i hope it does? able to close bay 2,3 and 4 to bay 1's data?
 
ok thanx guys, really i'm looking at options, i really want to have this setup done without and software needed to interact or keep the system running.

I set you a similar system using the Sans TowerRAID model. but i never did more that 100% redundancy AKA idk if it could do 3 complete clones because all i did was RAID 1.

only their website [ http://www.sansdigital.com/towerraid/index.php ] i see some models show as "clone" in the mode section just like RAID 1,2,5,10 does that mean what i hope it does? able to close bay 2,3 and 4 to bay 1's data?

The model http://www.sansdigital.com/towerraid/tr8ib.html at least supports what is called N-way mirroring which seems to be what you are looking for. According to the manual all SD EliteRaid and TowerRaid series features this N-way mirroring which is an extension of the Raid1 level. But looking at the site you provided not all models support this, you must manually look for it in the specifications sheet for each device.
 
The model http://www.sansdigital.com/towerraid/tr8ib.html at least supports what is called N-way mirroring which seems to be what you are looking for. According to the manual all SD EliteRaid and TowerRaid series features this N-way mirroring which is an extension of the Raid1 level. But looking at the site you provided not all models support this, you must manually look for it in the specifications sheet for each device.

That will do the job thanks to the n way mirror, but it's a lot pricier than the OWC Elite Pro thingie.

Edit: by the way, does anyone know of a Sansdigital supplier in the UK? I can find a couple of their 4 and 8 bay models from Amazon.co.uk and nothing else.

:confused:
 
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