Next Episode Coming Soon or Why Backups Are Important

Posted by James Kovacs on 2008/05/27

I’ve received a lot of great feedback on Becoming a Jedi and was planning on having the next episode done already. Unfortunately lightning struck twice. While fighting a horrid sore throat -likely the same illness that had Roy Osherove missing two of his three DevTeach presentations – my motherboard on my main dev box died a horrible BSOD death and corrupted my RAID array during its death throes. I’m picking up new hardware tomorrow and rebuilding the RAID array from a recent backup. Fingers crossed, I should be back in business and recording later this week, which would mean a new episode sometime next week. Thanks to everyone for your patience.

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I cannot stress enough the value of a good backup plan. My main workstation stores everything on a RAID 0+1 array. I have essential data (client documents, family photos, corporate information) replicated between multiple computers via FolderShare. Any development or writing is stored in a Subversion repository – public or private depending on the work. Each computer is backed up using Vista’s Backup, which is far superior to Windows Backup in previous versions. Those backups include more files than is replicated via FolderShare. (FolderShare limits you to 10,000 files per library, which isn’t enough if you’ve got a few Subversion working copies kicking around in there.)

Now why do you need a good replication and backup strategy if you’re storing your information on a RAID 0+1 array? You can rebuild the array if a drive fails. Aren’t the replication and backups redundant? For those who skipped the beginning of this blog post, you need backups just in case your motherboard dies a horrible death and corrupts your RAID array. Or you realize that you accidentally deleted an important file a few days ago and in the meantime you’ve emptied the Recycle Bin and run a defrag. RAID arrays – while fantastic for protecting you from drive failures (RAID 1 or 5), or increasing performance (RAID 0), or both (RAID 0+1) – still do exactly what you – or the operating system – tell them to do. If the operating system crashes horribly and while doing so, sends the command to format c:, guess what’s going to happen?

So do yourself a favour and make sure your backups are in order. You never know when you’re going to need them next…

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  • http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers Liam Westley

    Couldn’t agree more about adding regular backups to RAID backed disc arrays, to mitigate against this kind of RAID failure (I suffered the same loss several years ago on a RAID server, DVD backups saved me then).

    Now I have two external hard drives which perform a weekly backup (one every other week). Copies of the weekly backups are maintained in dated folders to create the ‘historical’ snapshot necessary to recover accidentally deleted files.

    This is from someone who has RAID on his developer PC, RAID on his file server, transfers his core docs and PST files on a portable notebook hard drive between the office and the home laptop daily AND still has a weekly backup regime.

    And remember, it’s not only faulty hardware that can trash a RAID array. A virus or rogue office macro could equally prove that although your RAID array ensures you have redundant copies of your data, that data might not actually be the data you were expecting.

    Liam

  • http://www.jamesthigpen.com James Thigpen

    Now that RAID has become commonplace, it’s unfortunate that a lot of people think that RAID *is* backup. It reminds me of the people that use source control like backup. In both cases, It’s just not what the technology is designed for.

    I love Mozy. I’m much too lazy a person for DVD backups. Mozy is one of those technologies I’m happy to evangelize for free and it has saved my bacon a few times already.

  • Jean-Francois

    James,

    I’ve been using Home server for a year now to backup 5 computers and family laptops. We restored quite a few times and it works like a charm. The downside is that Home Server doesn’t work with Mozy, so I put my backups on an external drive once a week and lock that up at work.

    Happy restoring.

  • http://geekswithblogs.net/mhildreth/Default.aspx Mark Hildreth

    I’ve recently put a computer in my living room with Linux software Raid 5. This WAS my backup strategy for my comptuer. However, since most of the stuff I would want backed up is Subversion, I just put a subversion server on there, and now it’s the only thing holding my entire repositories. Not much of a backup system :P

    Luckily, nothing life-critical, so the fact that I still don’t have a good backup strategy is only bugging me a lot, as opposed to losing me sleep. Your post put it back on the radar though, thanks.