Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 13:01:18 -0400 From: Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> To: Nick Barnes <Nick.Barnes@pobox.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: better disk reliability on a desktop machine Message-ID: <42D7EBDE.8030807@mac.com> In-Reply-To: <38171.1121430073@thrush.ravenbrook.com> References: <38171.1121430073@thrush.ravenbrook.com>
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Nick Barnes wrote: [ ... ] > I don't want to have to do all that ever again, after this iteration. You've had a learning experience, I see. :-) > So I'm thinking I probably want to move to a RAID mirror filesystem, > and keep some sort of quality backups offsite. > > 1. RAID mirror filesystem questions: > > 1a: should this be vinum? I have read and can follow the handbook > instructions for a vinum root filesystem. You should use a "real" (not software-driven) hardware RAID solution, say from 3ware or Promise for (parallel) ATA or SATA, or maybe Adaptec or LSI's SCSI-based RAID hardware if you want to get fancy and are willing to spend the extra bucks. Note that a good RAID controller comes with a small internal battery backup which it's cache and the drives are powered off of. > 1b: Will it help to upgrade to 5.x, to get this to go smoothly? Upgrading to 5.x is a seperate matter, but if you are rebuilding the box, it's a reasonable idea. 5.4 is only a bit different from 4.11 in terms of visible changes which might affect how you use it, but there are a lot of improvements underneath in terms of ACPI and USB support, as well as obviously better SMP (which is less likely to matter for a uniprocessor desktop). > 2. taking backups offsite. Seems to me that the best route is a > number of external firewire hard disks. This machine doesn't have > motherboard firewire, so I'll need to get a PCI firewire board. > > 2a: Recommendations for an affordable PCI firewire board? The VIA 6202 (I almost said 6502, but that was another era :-) works good, as does the firewire interface found on sound cards from a common vendor. Limited testing suggests that they all have very similiar performance and CPU overhead. > 2b: Should I upgrade to 5.x for the better firewire hardware support? The firewire support in 4.x seems to be very good, actually, and I think speaks highly of the people who wrote it. > 3c: Opinions on using firewire hard disks for this at all? Would I be > better off writing DVDs? Hard drives provide near-online backup, but only a single full iteration. You can do incrementals to DVD or CD-RW or tape, and keep many iterations handy, which is far more reliable. > 3. making backups. > > 3a: I'm used to dump/restore, but it seems to me that rsync might be a > better tool for this, as it would allow me to mount and browse the > backup. Opinions? This is good if you set up an entire system as a backup, although you could dual-purpose that box and have it act as a fileserver, proxy server, who knows, as well. -- -Chuck
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