Two Software RAID Volumes on a Mac Pro

[Zomes]

Quick question regarding the title of the post:

I'd like to know if it's possible, or even advisable to run two seperate software RAID 1 volumes in one Mac Pro?

Longer question if you have some time on your hands

The company I work for are buying a new file server and backup system and I'm looking into the best way to utilise the equipment that is being suggested we go with.

We are looking at a Mac Pro Server and my idea is to use one of the disks that comes with the Mac for the boot drive, use two 2TB enterprise class drives in a RAID 1 volume for our files and a fourth 2TB disk for a Time Machine backup. This is not the complete backup solution we are looking at. I just want to make sure we are utilising the server in the best way.

What we definitely want is some protection for the Time Machine archive which prompted me to ask the question in the title. Would it be a good idea to to install another drive in the spare optical bay and have Time Machine backing up to a RAID 1 volume? Or would a better idea be to use that fifth drive to do a scheduled clone of the Time Machine volume?

Or non of the above? I'd really appreciate any ideas on how we could go with this.

Cheers.

 

[tersono]

Yes, you can run two software RAIDs on the same machine without problems.

However, a backup that's on the machine it is backing up offers limited resilience.

Personally I have a software RAID on the G5 I use as a server. That backs up to an external RAID HD via time machine (you could use an internal array just as well). I also have a further hot-swap firewire HD with two disk trays. This has two interchangeable drives and keeps an incremental backup of all data directories (via Chronosync) on a daily basis. One disk is kept offsite - the other being the active backup. These drives are swapped out weekly. That way I can never lose more than 1 week's worth of data even in the case of a fire.

 

[Zomes]

For the backup I was thinking of a couple of external drives for a rotating daily or weekly incremental backup of our files, one being off site while the other is being used. Alongside that, a NAS box situated in another part of the factory (possibly offsite at a later date) to perform daily Rsync incremental backups.

My bosses seem to be sold on the idea of us doing daily backups to five separate external drives, which combined with the daily Rsync backup, seems over the top to me.

My main concern is making sure the Time Machine archive is protected as one of our main issues is people taking work off the server to work on and then forgetting to put it back before trashing it. I do know changing our work practice to always work off the server rather than our workstation desktops would help there.

Another thought was to use another external to do a daily clone of the Time Machine backup. From what I can gather, that's not as straight forward as it sounds because of the hard links in the Time Machine backup. I'm not sure if that's just in cases where people are wanting to clone the Time Machine backup and then have Time Machine use that clone. As long as we have a clone that we can access the archived files on in the event of the Time Machine disk failing I'll be happy.