Budget solution for data security

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henkc

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I've realised that despite an automated backup of key data - mainly photos and Lightroom catalogues, my data, particularly the photographic stuff, isn't as secure as I would like. I've looked at a few options and the most attractive to me at the moment is looking at a RAID array. My motherboard - Intel DP55WG will support this.

The options for security would be to look at RAID 1 - with a performance hit which I probably wouldn't like - RAID 5 or RAID 10. From my perspective, a RAID 10 array of 4 1TB drives (about R2k at current prices) would seem to be the optimal solution. What am I missing?
 
henkc said:
I've realised that despite an automated backup of key data - mainly photos and Lightroom catalogues, my data, particularly the photographic stuff, isn't as secure as I would like. I've looked at a few options and the most attractive to me at the moment is looking at a RAID array. My motherboard - Intel DP55WG will support this.

The options for security would be to look at RAID 1 - with a performance hit which I probably wouldn't like - RAID 5 or RAID 10. From my perspective, a RAID 10 array of 4 1TB drives (about R2k at current prices) would seem to be the optimal solution. What am I missing?
Click to expand...

RAID != backup!

"RAID guards against one kind of hardware failure. There's lots of failure modes that it doesn't guard against.

File corruption
Human error (deleting files by mistake)
Catastrophic damage (someone dumps water onto the server)
Viruses
Software bugs that wipe out data ..
"

If that is not what you are trying to protect against, then maybe RAID is a good answer for you. Otherwise . . .
 
Maybe I wasn't clear. I have an automated backup solution, although it could probably use some improvement. I was wondering if RAID was the only way to guard against disk failure. I haven't had one in years, but I've witnessed two recently. If it is, what is the performance hit incurred using RAID 1?
 
No, RAID is no guarantee against disk failure as some setups are for speed and some for reliability. A recent best practice our company has introduced is to keep it simply (mirrored only) and use different drives (can be same make, even same model but as long as its different batches but we prefer mixed brands now).
 
Best solution is an external hard drive, which you can also unplug and take "off site".

If you're using Windows download Synctoy, or rsync for Linux.
 
Yes like the others have said redundancy and reliability is not security.

If your PC gets stolen you lose the whole array. I would use sync toy or using cloud storage such as dropbox.
 
Forget raid. Sync across separate drives so you have multiple copies of the data.
 
twicode said:
Yes like the others have said redundancy and reliability is not security.

If your PC gets stolen you lose the whole array. I would use sync toy or using cloud storage such as dropbox.
Click to expand...

+1

Perhaps the OP will understand this:

Security is me pad locking my teenage daughters room.
Reliability is using a Yale lock instead of a Yanglock.
Redundancy is having a loaded shotgun
 
cbrunsdonza said:
+1

Perhaps the OP will understand this:

Security is me pad locking my teenage daughters room.
Reliability is using a Yale lock instead of a Yanglock.
Redundancy is having a loaded shotgun
Click to expand...
Antivirus = Condom
DEP = Birth control pills.
:D
 
How much data are you needing to 'secure'?

As others have mentioned, you can have a nice RAID setup but what happens if it gets stolen or your house burns down? Offsite backup is the only real was to have the best chance of keeping your data safe. Without an offsite backup you can easily lose your data, no matter how many RAID setups you have.
 
henkc said:
The options for security would be to look at RAID 1 - with a performance hit which I probably wouldn't like - RAID 5 or RAID 10. From my perspective, a RAID 10 array of 4 1TB drives (about R2k at current prices) would seem to be the optimal solution. What am I missing?
Click to expand...

If by security you simply mean redundancy, then this is what I have heard.

RAID10 should provide better redundancy, and is probably an all-round better solution if you can accomodate and afford the extra drives you will need over RAID5 for the same usable capacity. It can suffer more drive failures, is quicker to rebuild, and has much more balanced read/write speeds. RAID5 will give you faster reads, but much slower writes, and more capacity from the same number of drives. So, I guess unless you really need to max out read speeds or capacity, then RAID10 sounds like the better option.

Here is a really basic look at how those three RAID levels affect performance: link.
 
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