On Sun, 06 May 2012 20:25:56 +0530, Dennis Gallien <dwgallien@gmail.com> wrote:
fwiw on my primary machine which requires 100% uptime I use RAID with an additional disk which I mirror with rsync as a failover.
thanks to all of you for your replies. i understand things better now, mainly that RAID isn't so much to keep data safe, but to keep the server available in case of HDD failure. to keep data safe there needs to be another copy, preferably on a different machine. problem is that while storage is much cheaper than a few years ago, that's a relative statement, and for us it's neither cheap nor, and that's even more important, easily available. the only TB size HDDs one gets in kolkata these days are those "green" ones, that park every few seconds, only to be awakened again a couple sec.s later. there's supposedly a DOS utility to adjust that, but google finds mixed reports re. this. i can't easily get another 2TB drive now and will have to make do with two of them for the time being. for us data security is very important, while availability comes second. if that file server isn't available, there's still 'normal' sized HDDs in the workstations, plus a battery of USB drives here & there. (that used to be our "data storage solution" until now.) this way there's no problem saving new images, and access to the old one isn't time critical. (there's a separate web server, which holds the images used for publication, and doesn't depend on the file server in real time.) in this scenario i think it's best to go ahead without RAID, but rsyncing everything important to the second HDD -- until i manage to get another 2TB HDD, when i can implement both, RAID & backup copy. thanks again, -- phani. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org