Invisible wrote:
> Because the LTO system we have at work involves the tapes being put in a 
> fire resistant safe in a remote location. ;-) Obviously, a home user 
> with an external HD isn't going to do this.

Uh, I do. :-) At least, one of the backups goes in the local fireproof 
safe inside the local theft-proof safe, and the other is at the office.

If you encrypt it and have two, there's no real need to protect *all* 
the copies vigorously.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:48bea76f$1@news.povray.org...
>
> Because the LTO system we have at work involves the tapes being put in a 
> fire resistant safe in a remote location. ;-) Obviously, a home user with 
> an external HD isn't going to do this.
>

Why not?

I make a second copy of my backups (admittidly DVD) every couple of months 
and leave it in my parent's fire-proof safe.
I figure if my machine crashes, my local backups are destroyed and their 
house (55km away) is destroyed at the same time, there are probably lots 
bigger problems to worry about....

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Darren New wrote:
> 
> NTFS also creates journaling. The actual difference is that ext2 and 
> ext3 preallocate all the inodes, while NTFS doesn't.

Now that you mention, this has been discussed earlier.

Do you know if XFS preallocates all the inodes? It does take a 
significant time to mkfs.

>> What it doesn't do is dropping the disk from the array if it works,
> 
> I would have to disagree with you there.

I have to assume you have experience to show/tell us?

>> And yes, if your house burns down or your roofs gives up and lets the 
>> water in, you do have a bigger problem than your binary data.
> 
> I disagree. Fixing your house is just money. Getting back the vacation 
> photos, or the photos of people who are no longer alive, is much more 
> difficult.  :-)

Well yes, that's also true ;).

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
    http://www.zbxt.net
       aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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Gail wrote:

>> Because the LTO system we have at work involves the tapes being put in 
>> a fire resistant safe in a remote location. ;-) Obviously, a home user 
>> with an external HD isn't going to do this.
>>
> 
> Why not?
> 
> I make a second copy of my backups (admittidly DVD) every couple of 
> months and leave it in my parent's fire-proof safe.
> I figure if my machine crashes, my local backups are destroyed and their 
> house (55km away) is destroyed at the same time, there are probably lots 
> bigger problems to worry about....

Gail Shaw, that is without question the most robust backup plan I've 
ever heard anybody actually use IRL. Even the global corporation I work 
for doesn't go that far. (Our stuff is "off site", but not that many 
miles away.)

I guess there's an exception to every rule.... ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible wrote:
> 
> Well he got a newer motherboard where the chipset throws in a RAID 
> function just for fun (this seems to be very common now), and had the 
> exact same problem. (Despite it being an unrelated machine with 
> unrelated drives.)

Weird. Do the mobo and the card share the same chipset?

> That's true. Although I've never yet had occasion to need to format 
> multiple drives in the same day. ;-)

Oooh, you're just so young.

> 
> This is where the system my dad had failed; it would randomly drop 
> drives for no apparent reason. Once he turned RAID off completely, all 
> the drives worked just fine. Go figure.

That's what I figured.

OTOH, did you do any tests on that drive? Or checked S.M.A.R.T. log?

>>
>> Do backups ever seem like gaining a huge amount? Think again. How does 
>> external HD differ from LTO-tape in
>> 1) in virus-case, when all online files are compromised or deleted
>> 2) when your running data-disk breaks up
>> 3) when you'll accidentally press "delete"
>> 4) when the flood comes through your roof
>> 5) when some looney robs your laptop
> 
> Because the LTO system we have at work involves the tapes being put in a 
> fire resistant safe in a remote location. ;-) 

That's physical job, which has nothing to say with the type of the 
media. Even if it had, it would rule out case number 4.

> Obviously, a home user 
> with an external HD isn't going to do this.

And a home user with LTO would? Besides nothing stops you doing it with 
external HD at home.

> 
> ...it just means that that problem is dwarfed by all the other ones! :-D
> 

Which isn't equal with the problem being non-existent.

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
    http://www.zbxt.net
       aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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Eero Ahonen wrote:
> Do you know if XFS preallocates all the inodes? It does take a 
> significant time to mkfs.

No idea.

> I have to assume you have experience to show/tell us?

Yes. I have about 30 machines in production, all running Linux software 
RAID.  About once a month, one of the machines loses a drive which comes 
back just fine by me telling Linux to take it out of the raid and then 
put it back in again.  All new drives.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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Darren New wrote:
> Eero Ahonen wrote:
> 
>> I have to assume you have experience to show/tell us?
> 
> Yes. I have about 30 machines in production, all running Linux software 
> RAID.  About once a month, one of the machines loses a drive which comes 
> back just fine by me telling Linux to take it out of the raid and then 
> put it back in again.  All new drives.
> 

Intresting. At work we have 127 machines with SW-RAID-1 (running SuSE 
7.3, IIRC kernel 2.4.31) and if any of them drops a disk, there surely 
are errors on that disk.

I take it you've checked the logs (message log and S.M.A.R.T. -log) to 
see, if there would've been any indication of why the disk has been dropped.

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
    http://www.zbxt.net
       aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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Eero Ahonen wrote:
> I take it you've checked the logs (message log and S.M.A.R.T. -log) to 
> see, if there would've been any indication of why the disk has been 
> dropped.

Yeah. I don't remember what it said, but it was uninformative. Not a 
SMART error. Just some controller sync something or other. It could even 
be the power in the buildings. Lots of our servers, due to the nature of 
the service, are in private buildings not really designed for such.


-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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Well... she decided to take it elsewhere first, but they failed to fix 
it. So now the drive has come to me. (For anybody who missed it, YES, 
this is a USB flash drive, NOT a USB HD.)

I booted up KNOPPIX and plugged the drive in. It's reported as 64 MB. (I 
don't know if that's actually correct.) I was able to copy the entire 
contents using dd.

I just had a look at a hex dump of the file. The first few million 
octets are 0xFF. Then there's a block of 0x00. And then there's a block 
of seemingly random bytes which may be actual data.

I'm not an expert in such matters, but I was under the impression that 
the very first few octets is supposed to be a partition table. So it 
looks like that block has somehow got fried, which is why nothing is 
working now. It also looks like at least some usable data might still be 
there.

The oddessy will continue...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible wrote:

> The oddessy will continue...

Well, once I figured out that the filesystem sits directly on the drive 
rather than in a partition, Test Disk made short work of copying the 
files out of the disk image. Some of them are broken mind you, and 
several files showed up under multiple names, but much of the stuff 
still works.

We'll see if this makes me popular or not...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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