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I Nearly Lost All of My Data

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Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#51

Post by wtallis »

derekp7 wrote: post #10
2Ccltvcm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To prevent that you'll want to s̶t̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶s̶n̶a̶p̶s̶h̶o̶t̶s̶ ̶r̶e̶m̶o̶t̶e̶l̶y̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶w̶h̶e̶r̶e̶.̶ use a surge protector

Don't forget to replace your surge protector on an annual basis (or more frequently if you have really dirty power). Also, you can have a nasty fault in your PSU that fries everything also (If anyone knows of a surge protector that sits between the power supply and the motherboard, I'd really like to get one).

> (If anyone knows of a surge protector that sits between the power supply and the motherboard, I'd really like to get one)

I think the best you can do is just get a top-quality power supply. SeaSonic will sell you a ridiculously overengineered box with a 12-year warranty for $160; it's guaranteed to have a longer useful lifetime than any other component in your computer, probably even including the case itself.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#52

Post by ahnick »

Filligree wrote: post #5
bsder wrote: post #2

Z ... F ... S. And at least Raid-Z. Raid-5 and Raid-6 are now at probability of failure levels that your rebuild is likely to throw an error.

ZFS is great, but won't help if there's a power surge that fries all the disks at once. To prevent that you'll want to store snapshots remotely somewhere.

Exactly, my solution right now is to create encrypted backups of my raid-z2 FreeNAS instance (protected by a UPS) and then have a nightly cronjob copy the backup to a 4TB external hard drive using duplicacy (https://duplicacy.com). This drive gets rotated with another drive stored locally within the house, but in a fireproof and fairly waterproof location, then every 3 weeks I rotate the oldest drive out to a safety deposit box and bring the current drive in the safety deposit box back into the in-house rotation. Call me paranoid, but for me it's worth the peace of mind and ease of local restoration. Once you get in the routine it's really not that much work at all. :-)

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#53

Post by pmlnr »

- SSD + HDD in laptop, this latter for storage, because it actually tells me, if it's unhappy and about to die, unlike the m.2 ssd. The cost of this is to have an older laptop, in my case, a thinkpad x250.

- synced to home server, which, at this point, is a thinkpad x201 on an ultrabase with 2 disks - it has built-in ups, called a battery

- all of this synced to off-site rented server in Germany

- irreplacable photos are on blu-ray on yearly archives

This covers lost laptop, burglary, house fire/flood, etc. To avoid problems with lost ssh keys, I have a few users on that rented server which can log in with a password, in case of emergency.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#54

Post by ken »

cheeseprocedure wrote: post #26

A surge from a lightning strike near my home travelled over the cable line to kill a network switch and the WAN port on a firewall. (Strangely, the cable modem was spared.) Everything was on a decent UPS... but I’d completely forgotten the cable line.

Most of the UPSs and surge protectors I've seen for home use include coax, ethernet, and/or telephone protection, too, e.g., https://www.apc.com/shop/us/en/products/APC-Performance-Surg...

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#55

Post by hendry »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #45
gtirloni wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the RaspberryPi have enough CPU for disk encryption?

RaspberryPis can emulate Mario Kart on an N64, run Minecraft on Linux and even Mathematica at decent speeds; I'm willing to bet big bucks they can handle symmetric key encryption (which does not require much power). If a crappy NAS can run disk encryption, so can a raspberry pi. They're deceivingly potent.

Eloquent except the Rpi has a terrible USB bus.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#56

Post by [deleted] »

abrowne wrote: post #41

You need one copy somewhere else! What if there's a break-in or the roof leaks or whatever? My low-tech solution is two external drives, one of which is at my Mom's place and gets swapped every month or two.

[deleted]

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#57

Post by pmlnr »

bsder wrote: post #2

Z ... F ... S. And at least Raid-Z. Raid-5 and Raid-6 are now at probability of failure levels that your rebuild is likely to throw an error.

Sure. Encrypted ZFS with FreeBSD, have a power loss, goodbye data.

Should have read the manual though, it does tell you to make a backup of certain data ranges in case of encrypted ZFS for this specific case, so it's partly my fault.

That said, I'm using ZFS ever since, but on top of LUKs with linux.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#59

Post by jen729w »

Karunamon wrote: post #17
linsomniac wrote: post #11

Kudos to Synology for having a process to recover on a Linux box if the Synology box craps the bed. I was reading this story thinking "this is a good lesson on why you don't buy an expensive SAN, unless you can afford to buy two". But, the other lesson is: Backups. Sounds like backups were shut off 6 months prior. The other lesson is: Monitoring. Backups were going to the USB drive, but it that stopped working at som…

The nice thing about Synology storage stuff is that it's a nice GUI (seriously, they're about the only company I can think of that's doing appliance management right) on top of standard and battle-tested open source tools. This was one of the reasons I was okay with paying their prices. Even if the device completely craps the bed, I'll be able to hook the drives containing absolutely normal LVM/btrfs volumes up to an…

It’s the reason I’m desperate to get my pro-photographer best mate off her old Drobo and on to a new Synology. Should be happening in the next few weeks, and not a minute too soon.

The Drobo is literally a black box to me. It either mounts and you can see disks, or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t ... well. Yep. Right-o. I’ll try rebooting it, I guess.

Re: I Nearly Lost All of My Data

#60

Post by gammateam »

He doesnt confirm that the drives are faulty, and it isnt clear that they are, as the data is accessible while maybe some partition or boot data was scrambled but repairable

The NAS should also have a warranty of some kind or the controller could be repaired for cheap

He was never in any data peril, so just fix that and then add an offsite backup to the mix

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