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Don't rely on RAID

Posted At : November 9, 2006 3:02 PM | Posted By : Nat Papovich
Related Categories: Hardware

Upon returning from MAX 2006 in Las Vegas, my workstation was a little frozen. "No problem, a quick reboot," I thought. Alas, "NO SYSTEM DISK OR DISK ERROR" greeted me. "Well at least I have RAID," I thought.

Fat lot of good that did me.

After days and days of rebuilding my system (and only losing a wee bit of extremely important stuff), I determined that the RAID controller (Silicon Image 3114) onboard my motherboard (Asus A8N-SLI) corrupted the RAID information on the disks, destroying the RAID array, which took out the boot information. So I couldn't just break the mirror and reboot because the RAID data was corrupted.

Long story short, I've rebuilt everything and am back up and running using the onboard nVidia RAID chip, not the Silicon Image chip.

After I had everything installed just right, I bought Acronis TrueImage and a non-RAID, 500GB NAS. Now I've got scheduled nightly backups of my data, weekly backups of all my miscellaneous junk and a mandate to take occasional images of my system drive. The theory being that if I suffer a simple HDD failure, I can swap out the disk in the RAID array. But if something happens to my computer with data corruption or massive, smoking hardware failures, I still have the NAS backup.

So for those of you putting all your eggs in the RAID basket, don't! Before long, something will happen, then you'll be as bad off (or worse) as if you didn't have RAID.

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Nat,

You might also want to consider adding some sort of off-site backup into your mix.

"Disasters" come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Sounds like if your office burns down you may still be screwed.

Don't get me wrong, kudos on your current backup arrangements. But some sort of off-site will help round it out. I rotate a backup tape to a friend's on a quarterly basis (hey, that counts as "off-site storage" ;-). I also see that there are now Internet based services that you can just upload to.

hth,

g
# Posted By greg h | 11/9/06 5:20 PM
Hey Nat. Yes, RAID is a fairly misunderstood thing. RAID 1 (mirroring) actually does nothing but prevent a disk controller failure from bringing down your system. If one controller fails, you can simply set the system to boot using the other controller. The unfortunate reality is that if the DATA itself is corrupted on one drive, that corruption will also be mirrored to the other drive. Unless it is a server where uptime is demanded, RAID 1 actually provides very little benefit.

For the actual backup of important data, I agree that an OFFSITE backup is mandatory. I've been using Carbonite with great success. It's only 5 bucks a month for unlimited space. It is very simple to use. It doesn't have a huge set of fancy features or advanced options, you just set the directories you want backed up and it backs them up. I wrote a blog post about this a little while back: http://www.briankotek.com/blog/index.cfm/2006/8/14...

Hope that helps.
# Posted By Brian Kotek | 11/9/06 5:35 PM
hi, since i just had almost the same problem...
in my case i think norton screwed up my document and setting folder plus some windows boot files
what kind of recovery tool/program do you suggest?
# Posted By MK_77 | 11/10/06 1:56 AM
I had a client who thought that since they were running their server in a RAID environment, it was a substitution for frequent backups.

However, just like in your case, their RAID controller went bad and started writing corrupt data to all their drives. Their db got totalled screwed.

Fortunately, I had been working on a project for them and had been pulling snapshots of the database fairly frequently, so between my backup and what we could restore from the corrupted database we able to recover almost all data.

Fortunately, they keep hard copies (i.e. print copies) of everything, so we were able to restore pretty much everything in the end. It just meant they were down for a substancial period of time while we rebuilt everything.
# Posted By Dan G. Switzer, II | 11/10/06 7:36 AM
If you want a tool to do local backups, perhaps to an external USB hard drive, the only one to get is Norton Ghost. It creates a bit-for-bit image of your entire hard drive. If the data is ever corrupted, you can simply run the Ghost recovery disk and it just drops the drive image back onto your hard drive. You can be back up and running like nothing happened in about an hour or two.
# Posted By Brian Kotek | 11/10/06 8:29 AM
I have this NAS solution as well. So far so good :).

@Brian: Ghost was good back in the day (before Norton bought it), but since it's just bloatware (IMO). About a year ago I tried upgrading a HDD in my laptop (WinXP) and used my licensed copy of Ghost to take one of my regular full backups and restore it on a new HDD (for my laptop). What a nightmare. I then purchased Acronis TrueImage and it worked flawlessly (and is a lot smaller and easier to deal with (again, IMO)).
# Posted By Jeff Coughlin | 11/13/06 2:54 PM
I hear ya about the offsite thing. My office is in my home, so if there is a fire or somesuch, I'm not going to be thinking about my lost data for a long time. We're going to implement a offsite-backup-via-friends system in the near future, so I'll take a look at Carbonite. Thanks for the link.

Regarding Ghost vs TrueImage, there are lots of favorable reviews of TrueImage over Ghost, so that's why I picked it up.
# Posted By Nat Papovich | 11/13/06 3:05 PM
I agree that most Norton stuff is bloated, but Ghost 9.0 works well and I haven't had any problems with it. I like that it can do a full drive image without rebooting (like the old Ghost required) and that it has a brain-dead simple recovery CD. You just boot to the CD and it loads a recovery console, USB drivers for the external USB hard drive, and then you just hit restore and it does it.

Of course, just HAVING a backup is far more crucial than what you use to create the backup!
# Posted By Brian Kotek | 11/13/06 10:53 PM
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