Quote from: Speeddog on November 26, 2012, 08:50:50 AM
Just to clarify the terminology/semantics for a non-techie....

I'm understanding that a RAID is normally used as the 'primary' drive, IE it's constantly being used to store and retrieve data, like I do on my laptop with it's internal drive?

(oversimplified) raid is just a bunch of disks "working together". as far as your computer is concerned, it's just another drive. "under the hood," depending on the configuration, it can have some additional redundancy to protect against a single drive (raid1/raid5) or dual drive (raid6) failure. raid0, on the other hand, has none of these protections.

Quote from: Speeddog on November 26, 2012, 08:50:50 AM

If I copy all the data (or mirror?) from my lappy to a seperate drive, is that not a backup?

this is a good article about backups.

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheComputerBackupRuleOfThree.aspx

to answer your question, it depends.

it can be a backup, but would not be adequate for me to say my personal, important, irreplaceable data is "backed up".

i'd highly recommend an additional, not-in-the-same-building-as-my-other-computer/storage device backup.

Quote from: Speeddog on November 26, 2012, 08:50:50 AM
Just to clarify the terminology/semantics for a non-techie....

I'm understanding that a RAID is normally used as the 'primary' drive, IE it's constantly being used to store and retrieve data, like I do on my laptop with it's internal drive?

If I copy all the data (or mirror?) from my lappy to a seperate drive, is that not a backup?

A raid array lets you delete or overwrite your important files faster than you could if they were on a single disk. If you're happy for your "backup solution" to not include protecting you from (some of) the stupid stuff it's possible to do, then maybe you'll consider raid "good enough" for your backups.

Ask yourself how you'd recover from accidentally deleting, say, your accounts software data file. What if it took you a few days or weeks to realise youy'd deleted an important file? If you're relying on raid alone, those answers are probably scaring you. Same with some methods of the "copy data to a separate drive" technique - how do you restore a file you deleted last month? For me, a backup solution needs to keep old versions of files and definitely not delete yesterday's version just because I deleted the file today.

(Mac users have no excuse not to be running Time Machine to solve all their backup problems. For Windows users, I hear something called Shadow Copy is a good start, with the proviso that it stores your versioned backup on the same disk as the original data, so you need something extra to protect against disk/controller failure (all of my "windows machines" these days are VMs backed up via the host OS). If you're on Linux, you are probably rolling your eyes 'cause you rolled your own rsync/cron/shellscript version of this years ago...)

I am in 100% agreement with Derby here. Except on the PC side of things. I too am "that guy" in a Windows world and when I get into a client environment and find out that they are "backing up" to an on-site array and have no off-site redundancy, it is quite literally the first thing I will push for.
Pretty much every mission critical enterprise on the planet will back up locally(on-site not locally as in on the machine) and then have off-site redundancy. Hell, even the beer distributor I worked for shuffled 7 days worth of tapes off-site to a safe deposit box once a week.

Anyone have some feedback on this.

http://www.drobo.com/products/professionals/drobo/index.php

Just got a Seagate GoFlex Home 2TB unit.

Doing the first backup now.
It's averaging ~15 Gb per hour over the last 2 hours, connected *directly* to my lappy via ethernet cable.

Running it through the router was painfully slow.

Seagate cyborg that I talked to on the phone said the regular backups via router or WiFi would be quite fast as it only has to deal with the files that have been modified.
We'll see about that. 
Nothing speed-related has been impressive so far...

Question remains.... What if I inadvertently delete something important?

Does it leave it be on the backup, or blast it 'cause I deleted off my machine?

Quote from: Speeddog on December 03, 2012, 06:22:21 PM

Question remains.... What if I inadvertently delete something important?

Does it leave it be on the backup, or blast it 'cause I deleted off my machine?

if the software you're using is smart, it'll keep iterative versions of the files until you run out of space.

if it's not, it'll just blow it away.

i have zero experience w/ whatever software comes w/ the seagates.

So that's a definite maybe. 

Seriously, thanks for the feedback. 

I'll likely annoy the support borgs at Seagate about it.

+1M for offsite backups.  Using crashplan is super easy.  Just buy another external drive and find a someone 'who you trust' and plug it in on their computer.  then just backup to that drive at their house, thus giving you offsite storage without the monthly fee.

even if you think your data is of no use to anybody else, just imagine what it would be like to either recreate it, or tell you wife you lost the only pix of the baby...

you can get 2TB drives for about $100 which for most people will be way more space than needed for a long time.

I crashplan my Macbook Air, Win7 server and another XP machine to a computer across town.  sure it took a while to get the backup done initially but after that it updates and stays up to date with no effort and will email you if something goes wrong.

If you want to make your own cloud service like dropbox/box.net/google drive, etc.  try www.owncloud.com  it's open-source and works well but its under heavy development right now.  I'm using it and about ready to pull all my data from dropbox to help minimize my exposure.

Quote from: Speeddog on December 03, 2012, 06:22:21 PM
Doing the first backup now.
It's averaging ~15 Gb per hour over the last 2 hours, connected *directly* to my lappy via ethernet cable.

Running it through the router was painfully slow.

You probably have a router with a built-in 10/100 Mb/sec switch. You could get a cheap gigabit switch (Netgear GS605, for example) and connect your laptop, the NAS and the router to the switch. This way, all traffic between the laptop and the NAS will be through the switch. Any internet traffic will go through the switch to the router.

Quote from: Speeddog on December 03, 2012, 06:22:21 PM
Question remains.... What if I inadvertently delete something important?

Does it leave it be on the backup, or blast it 'cause I deleted off my machine?

Depends on how you're backing up. Most purpose-made backup programs will copy all the data on the first run, and on subsequent runs only transfer the differences. Each run maintains a copy of those differences. This means that accidental deletions can be recovered up to the point where a backup was made.

In my previous job, I did technical support for a company whose name begins with "I" and ends in "omega" for NAS units that typically had RAID arrays.  On multiple occasions we would see multiple drive failures for what were supposedly enterprise devices, and saw more  than a few occasions where the replacement drives took over a month to ship out.  I made one customer cry when I gave her (an independent CPA) the company line on backups ("One NAS is an archive, two is a backup; you should have bought a second unit.") when she lost multiple drives in a RAID 5 array because we took too long to ship a replacement.  She lost 3 years of client data, and then I got to tell her that for $50k we'd recover the data that our ineptitude caused her to lose.

I agree and endorse every statement in this thread that says that RAID is not a backup.  RAID provides a level of extra security, but if you lose the array your data is still gone.  If you can't manage a network-based offsite backup solution, try an old-school twist on that: take a pair of drives, keep one at your house for local backups and keep one at a buddy's house.  Perform your backups weekly or monthly (it's personal data, so you shouldn't need much more frequent than that) and swap the drives.  A little pricier, and you don't have to worry about racking up someone else's electric bill.

Backed up my desktop too.

Issues so far:

Backup files are named only with date and time.
All well and good, other than I have to drill down in the content to figure out which computer it is.

It did not backup the other partitions of my desktop drive.
That's an annoyance I'll have to work out with Seagate, unless someone here knows how to do it.
I can copy each partition into a folder, but that doesn't seem to be the best plan.

Quote from: Speeddog on December 04, 2012, 10:20:42 AM
Backed up my desktop too.

Issues so far:

Backup files are named only with date and time.
All well and good, other than I have to drill down in the content to figure out which computer it is.

It did not backup the other partitions of my desktop drive.
That's an annoyance I'll have to work out with Seagate, unless someone here knows how to do it.
I can copy each partition into a folder, but that doesn't seem to be the best plan.

sounds like it's a relatively "oldschool" backup app, just doing regular backup "bundles" to disk vs tape.

you should be able to edit the backup job to add the partitions/drives that are currently not included.

to answer your earlier question, if each of those backup files is a complete backup session, and it's not overwriting the "sessions" each time, you should also have versions vs a file being deleted from backup when you delete it from disk.

additionally, ntbackup.exe (included with windows xp) or sdclt.exe ("backup and restore," included with windows 7) may offer you more flexiblity than the seagate app (again, which i have zero experience with).

Spent some more time on the horn to Seagate.
If I keep this up, I'll probably get the "Oh, it's *you* again." 

The tech confirmed that I can add the other partitions, just need to click on the 'Advanced Options' and drag'n'drop.

A peculiarity of the software (Vimeo) is that if you've got two computers with the same Login name, both backup folders get put in the same folder.
Since the backup folders are named with the date and time, it's something that could be dealt with.
But I'm not comfortable at all with that.
I'll be renaming my desktop, and re-doing the backup with all the partitions included.
That'll get it it's own folder and get a *complete* backup all in one batch.

After a bit of Q&A with the tech....

After the 'full' initial backup, any files modified and saved on the computer get overwritten in the backup.
So the good thing is, it's continuously updating the backup.
The bad thing is,  it's continuously updating the backup. 
If I save a corrupted file, then it's diligently included in the backup.

The tech confirmed that an ordinary portable HD would be an excellent addition to the backup plan.
Drag'n'drop copies of the backup files into it, then store it offsite.

Assuming regular copying of the backup files sequentially into folders, such that I have (weekly?) versions stored offsite, I have a ~reasonable level of protection against hardware failure, file corruption, and natural/unnatural disaster.

The only exposure I see right now is that I have to have both HD's physically in one spot to update the offsite files.
So it's not foolproof, just fool-resistant.

I prodded the tech for a personal recommendation for a more sophisticated backup software option.
He said Acronis True Image was his preference.

Quote from: Speeddog on December 04, 2012, 02:04:45 PM

The tech confirmed that an ordinary portable HD would be an excellent addition to the backup plan.
Drag'n'drop copies of the backup files into it, then store it offsite.

Assuming regular copying of the backup files sequentially into folders, such that I have (weekly?) versions stored offsite, I have a ~reasonable level of protection against hardware failure, file corruption, and natural/unnatural disaster.

The only exposure I see right now is that I have to have both HD's physically in one spot to update the offsite files.
So it's not foolproof, just fool-resistant.

for the cost of one physical harddrive, you can have four years of encrypted, unlimited-storage crashplan+ backups (that you don't have to think about).

https://www.crashplan.com/consumer/store.vtl (crashplan+ unlimited, for a single machine)

by default, that'll back you up to off-site every 15 minutes, maintain versions, protect against overwritten/corrupt files, etc.