31–40 of 53 posts
Not to say that it's the best solution for everyone, but simply that it leaves people no excuse for doing nothing.
My current setup goes as follows:
Servers in colocation get backup daily to a server in the office. That server in the office then gets backed up daily to a iosafe.com fire and water proof hard drive in the office which when I get a chance will be bolted to the desk for further security. Clones are then made of that server biweekly (which are bootable) and one is kept in the office and one is taken offsite.
So the office server is the offsite for the colo server and the clone of that is the backup for the office.
The clones allow you to test the backup (hook it up and it boots basically).
Added: Geographically the office is about 3 miles from where the backup of the office is kept. But the office is about 40 miles from where the colo servers are kept.
The community has discussed the idea of adding a feature to specify a minimum streaming replication delay This is a feature of Oracle, the redo logs are replicated to the standbys as normal, so you have an up to date copy of them on the standby, but only applied after an x hour delay. You can roll the standby forward to any intervening point in time and open it read-only to copy data out. Less need of it these days w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course a RAID controller isn't supposed to fail silently, but it can and it does. I can't think of many complex pieces of technology that work 100% all of the time.
You don't think that something that only exists to create disk redundancy is in a different category from complex pieces of technology that don't have this in their name? I simply disagree that you should "never underestimate" your raid controller's ability to fail silently (which is the comment I was replying to). If this is even on your radar you don't have a RAID controller. This is literally like saying. "Never u…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't think that something that only exists to create disk redundancy is in a different category from complex pieces of technology that don't have this in their name? I simply disagree that you should "never underestimate" your raid controller's ability to fail silently (which is the comment I was replying to). If this is even on your radar you don't have a RAID controller. This is literally like saying. "Never u…
I don't know what you're getting at, but I think you are underestimating the chance that your RAID controller will fail.
If I did get one, I wouldn't get one that tended to silently fail, since that would pretty well defeat the purpose of thinking my disks were redundant, wouldn't it?
redundancy != backup
Actually, backups are redundancy. You just have to structure your redundancy to survive multiple threat models. In which case, the redundancy offered by RAID alone is grossly insufficient.
Fun anecdote: years ago, I worked for a department that had its server on a RAID setup, and when I asked about backups they said, "Don't worry". One day, a drive failed. They replaced it and started restoring from the other drive - which failed mid-sync. The two drives were from the same production lot and died literally within 12 hours of each other. So: back up your data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course a RAID controller isn't supposed to fail silently, but it can and it does. I can't think of many complex pieces of technology that work 100% all of the time.
You don't think that something that only exists to create disk redundancy is in a different category from complex pieces of technology that don't have this in their name? I simply disagree that you should "never underestimate" your raid controller's ability to fail silently (which is the comment I was replying to). If this is even on your radar you don't have a RAID controller. This is literally like saying. "Never u…
You must test your backups. I used a commercial backup service that sent daily status emails. It seemed great for months until I realized it had a bug and there was nothing in the archive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what you're getting at, but I think you are underestimating the chance that your RAID controller will fail.
Actually, I don't have a RAID controller. But at least I don't think I have one! If I did get one, I wouldn't get one that tended to silently fail, since that would pretty well defeat the purpose of thinking my disks were redundant, wouldn't it?