Off site backup

[xparaparafreakx]

I been thinking about it for the last three years and figure the way the budget is, redundancy is more important then back up. Raid 1+0 for my set up.

So my question is, do I really need an off site backup for my OD information and data?

I work at a school and figure fire will not happen and theft only happens to the out skirts classrooms. Nothing inside campus has been stolen and no fires anywhere.

 

[crackpip]

I been thinking about it for the last three years and figure the way the budget is, redundancy is more important then back up. Raid 1+0 for my set up.

So my question is, do I really need an off site backup for my OD information and data?

I work at a school and figure fire will not happen and theft only happens to the out skirts classrooms. Nothing inside campus has been stolen and no fires anywhere.

Seriously? What kind of data are we talking about that you can waste half your disk space with a RAID 1 and the added expense of hardware RAID, but can't afford back-up drives? I hope you're not depending on software RAID. Off-site backup doesn't have to be 24/7 immediate access. A weekly rotation between sets of external drives along with a quick trip to a local bank's deposit boxes, can be fairly cheap. It all depends on how important your data is. I had a friend who lost a major chunk of his Ph.D. dissertation in a tornado. Fortunately, he only had to delay graduation a semester.

There are other situations your not considering such as power surges and spikes. I don't know where you live, but if you get thunderstorms, no surge protector will protect against a close lightning strike. Institutional power can also be pretty 'dirty', surge protectors degrade over time in these environments possibly leaving you open to a fried machine. A broken water pipe or malfunctioning toilet could leak into the server room. At my former university, the contractors hired to replace the roof of one of the buildings screwed up the job, causing major leaks all around the upper two floors of the building including some damage to one of the server rooms.

You can't prepare for any eventuality without a significant amount of cash, but still, **** happens, best be as prepared as possible.

crackpip

 

[chrysrobyn]

I been thinking about it for the last three years and figure the way the budget is, redundancy is more important then back up. Raid 1+0 for my set up.

So my question is, do I really need an off site backup for my OD information and data?

I work at a school and figure fire will not happen and theft only happens to the out skirts classrooms. Nothing inside campus has been stolen and no fires anywhere.

Never underestimate the cunning idiocy of students or the great ability of mother nature to find ways to decimate man's creations.

At the minimum, find a friend in another building you can cross-mount shares with. It's not offsite, but your odds are far better, and the cost is minimal. If your data is small enough, dump it to a USB drive and keep it in your backpack so it goes home with you every night (encryption on, with spare keys safe).

 

[xparaparafreakx]

300 students with home folders and lots of crap they have. Teachers like the idea that their word documents staying with the students from 7th grade to 8th grade.

Then the staff...enough said there.

Hardware Raid of course.

Never thought those other causes that would make my server die. I always though theft and fire were #1 causes of those kind of things.

I know it sounds like bull*hit but I work in a public school. They figure uptime was more important then back up. They cited the common items, no fire ever happened, theft is on the out skirts.

The best one though, maybe next year the budget will be better and ill get a back up system.

 

[ChrisA]

I been thinking about it for the last three years and figure the way the budget is, redundancy is more important then back up. Raid 1+0 for my set up.

So my question is, do I really need an off site backup for my OD information and data?

I work at a school and figure fire will not happen and theft only happens to the out skirts classrooms. Nothing inside campus has been stolen and no fires anywhere.

Do you use seat belts in your car? Why? I've never had a serious accident.

Your logic is faulty. when you say "we've never had a fire" that may be true but EVERYONE who has had a fire said "we've never had a fire". It is very rare to have it happen twice. Also your statistical sample size is very small (just your one school) with such a small sample size works like "never" don't mean much because the error bars are so huge

You can have off-site backup for less than the cost of RAID. Use the same number of disks but keep some of them off site.

If your data is importent then you need multiple redundant backups. A common method is to have one copy off site, one copy in a locked fire safe and one near the computer, maye that one is Time Machine.

Use RAID only if you can't buy a large enough disk drive (because to have more then 1TB o data) of if you need better performance than you can get with just one drive.

A very common reason for lost data is simply human error. Some one deletes something and does not notice. RAID can't halp you there you need to go into your backup rotation and find a weeks old copy of the file. If you are on a budget Time Machine is a better use of disk drives than RAID1 (mirror)