Hi Ian,
ah no worries, you did make some valid comments on the detail missing, my retort was merely challenging you to divulge more as you clearly have a high level of some IT flavour/s lurking there.
Not often someone has the balls to come on these forums and offer a pipe of peace, respect that man
Still would like to hear your thoughts sometime on what is a primary backup solution for todays average joe with a trailor load of multimedia stored between various devices.
cheers to friday!
It's a difficult one to answer and i've restarted my reply several times in order to give you a definitive answer, which I think is probably impossible.
It lies in the realms of questions like "What's the best software/hardware to do ..."., and you only have to scan this forum to find that there are endless debates on the various "..." bits.
i'm kind of old school and come from an era, like many, where there were no PC's, repair centres or freely available "experts", and if you wanted to achieve/install/maintain something, you had to be imaginitive and understand or "trial and error" the available technology in order to make it so.
Unfortunately, stuff has now become cheap and more available and every manufacturer will tell you that their product is the best. The "average Joe", to use your words, doesn't really stand a chance and will generally believe the claims put to them by the manufacturer.
Let me use an example from tomathy's post regarding the ReadyNAS duo. One of the features claims
"•Never lose data due to drive failure by simply adding a second drive"
I'm sure I am not alone when I say that I have seen RAID fail and when it does, it can fail bigtime. You could be left with a pile of electronics and no data.
It would probably be more truthful to say:
"•Reduce the possibility of data loss due to drive failure by simply adding a second drive".
With backups, the idiom "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" is probably the best thing to keep in mind. Keep your important data in several locations so that, in the event of that really unexpected failure, you can get it back from another source.
I can remember a time when a 1GB drive would cost you more than a seriously high spec. machine would cost you today. Now it's cheap enough to have several external drives to replicate your data to.
NAS is a great idea if you want to share your data. RAID is great for reducing down times and the combination of the two can also be extremely useful. However, it you are relying on it as your sole backup resource, you are kind of accepting that the technology will never let you down by relying on what can be considered a black box.
I think this thread has covered the need for further backup considerations and those with a reasonable amount of knowledge accept these things and won't be relying on this single form of technology to keep us safe.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned, unless i've missed it, is how good are our backups. We truly never know until we try to restore them. I've not experienced it myself, but I know of others who have relied on their backups being sound when indeed, they were not. When the crunch happened, the restore failed and they ended up with nothing.
I suppose my post could be considered as scare mongering, but again, it's a generalization and each person will have a different idea of how important their data is. I guess there are no hard and fast rules, just something to bear in mind when considering what approach to take.
I suppose it's like saying that flying is the safest form of transportation. You just hope you are not on one from that Friday afternoon engine build
.
Ian now steps off his soap box and reaches for his Friday evening pint.
