R.A.I.Ds and home networks.

[recurve]

I run 4 PC's on my home network, with two hard wired and two wireless.

Having just had a terminal hard drive failure on one of the laptops that has lost me a fair bit of stuff, I got to thinking about setting up a RAID

I know the idea is that you automatically back up stuff onto the array of disks, but I have no real practical understanding of setting one up.

Was thinking of setting up a tower PC I have floating about as a print server, and I was wondering if I could stick in some extra hard drives together with a raid card, and mirror stuff of importance off each of the network machines. That machine would just sit there humming to itself, saving my stuff and sending other stuff to the printers(s) when required, so no games, no junk, no nuffink other than a workhorse machine.

Anyone got any thoughts on the practicality/ease of doing all this?

TIA

[DannyB]

Right....

RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks

All it does is improves the reliability of the disks so that should one fail your data remains intact, it is not in itself a file or print sharer.

You can set it up as a file/print sharer using standard windows (not XP Home I think) it's not massivly complex.

Setting up the RAID array itself is relatively simple, most people use RAID5, this option means you loose the capacity of one disk to maintain integrety, so 5*18GB disks will give you 72GB available.

http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/pro...nation_of_raid gives a reasonable (if not simple) explanation of the different types of RAID array (Ignore anything other than 0,1 and 5)

[Sakara Drinker]

Would it not be easier to regularly 'ghost' your hard drives and keep the image files on different machines?

[DannyB]

Would it not be easier to regularly 'ghost' your hard drives and keep the image files on different machines?

Takes more disk and time, data resiliance is only as good as the last ghost (normally several months old) having a file server with some kind of redundancy (raid/tape) is far far easier.

Danny

[recurve]

I don't know, that's why I'm asking

[keith_henson]

or setup a NAS system -inexpensive with a bit o linux running

[thumpr]

Forgive me if I am understanding you incorrectly but it sounds like you are expecting the raid card to take data off your various computers and mirror it on the new file/print server. If this is what you expect then I am afraid it will not work.

RAID is just a storage option. For example RAID 1 allows you to use two disks (on the same machine) as 1 disk. The spare disk serves as a mirror in case the first fails.

It is a useful option for a file server but you would still need to implement your own strategy for backing up your other machines onto the server.

If you want to setup a network file share on the file/print server that all the other machines use for storing data then this will work fine. RAID would then give you the redundancy on the file/print server to protect your data.

[Scuby]

I've just got one laptop here now so a slightly simpler setup than you obviously, but I have similar requirements - want to make sure the important stuff is safe, especially with the laptop. If I ever take it out of my room (not that often) i'll always do a backup to an external hard drive first. A bit paranoid about it now.

I do that as a simple "plug the hard drive in and synchronise my important files and folders". Windows has this functionality built in (briefcase) and to be honest seems the easiest way to do it - the files are accessible as if they were on your local hard drive (no massive .backup files or anything like that), and means I don't backup absolutely everything. In reality, I tend to think that in the very rare case that my hard drive might disappear, its probably worth doing a reinstall of the software anyway. As a result, my backups are much smaller and much quicker than they would otherwise be.

For you, you could do the same kind of thing but with a server. Setup a briefcase folder (not 100% sure how, mine was special software with the harddrive but I believe its built in) and just every now and then run the synchronisation - deletes anythign thats gone, adds things that are new. You could set it up to do it every few days if you wanted - I just do it manually since the external drive isn't always plugged in.

David

[DannyB]

Forgive me if I am understanding you incorrectly but it sounds like you are expecting the raid card to take data off your various computers and mirror it on the new file/print server. If this is what you expect then I am afraid it will not work.

RAID is just a storage option. For example RAID 1 allows you to use two disks (on the same machine) as 1 disk. The spare disk serves as a mirror in case the first fails.

It is a useful option for a file server but you would still need to implement your own strategy for backing up your other machines onto the server.

If you want to setup a network file share on the file/print server that all the other machines use for storing data then this will work fine. RAID would then give you the redundancy on the file/print server to protect your data.

Didn't I say that

Danny

[PBrown]

I think you may be confusing different things.

As Danny has already said RAID (in itself) is simply a method of spreading data across various hard disks so that in the event of a hard disk failure the data is recoverable.

A backup is deliberately taking a copy of your data at a particular point in time and (usually) storing it on another machine, or in another format. There are a huge variety of strategies for performing backups and businesses spend colossal amounts of money on the hardware & software to do this reliably.

The simplest, & probably cheapest, option is to use the inbuilt XP utility to perform a backup and then copy it onto another machine, do this on a regular basis and keep a number of previous versions.


HTH

cheers,
Paul