[mythtv-users] warning for anyone with western digital green drives

[PJR]

Jeff, I really want a totally self contained backup system, ie one that
runs on the FE/BE server not on another machine. I also need the backup
to be scheduled by waking up on RTC alarm (as is the FE/BE server for
recordings). As I said I thought RAID was a 'simple' answer to my
requirements but it seems it isn't.




On 16/02/12 17:31, Jeff Siddall wrote:
> On 02/15/2012 07:17 PM, PJR wrote:
>> There's only space in my 1U case (in the rack) for 3 drives, one SSD for
>> everything except myth media storage, two in a RAID array for myth media
>> storage.  I only need 'light' data redundancy as most of the myth data
>> is TV programmes which if lost, who cares (except my wife if she hasn't
>> seen her 'shows' yet), the rest is music and videos all (tediously)
>> recoverable from original media.  I'm beginning to think that I should
>> go back to my old system of occasionally manually backing up the myth
>> media to a second drive. I'd prefer to have an 'automated' way of doing
>> this since the combined FE/BE system shuts down when not recording (or
>> playing) and wakes up by RTC alarm to record, hence automating a backup
>> is not so easy.  Sounds like RAID is just too hard to get working (from
>> a HW perspective) and judging by no recommendations, yet, as to suitable
>> drives (meeting my requirements), that confirms it.
> I am not trying to say RAID is too hard to get working because in 
> general it is not.  But it only solves the problem of disk failure(s).
>
> For more general redundancy you _really_ need to look at BackupPC:
>
> http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
>
> It is a hidden gem that everyone should be using.  I will not say it is 
> especially easy to get working, but it has some fantastic features and 
> the investment in getting it setup once will give you perpetual peace of 
> mind.
>
> Specifically:
>
> 1. You can backup both local filesystems and remote filesystems over the 
> network.  That allows you to run BackupPC and the associated backup disk 
> on a machine far away from other machines (ex: your myth system(s)). 
> Just keep in mind that gigabit LAN is a good thing if you are backing up 
> tons of data remotely.
>
> 2. You can choose when stuff gets backed up.  The BackupPC server will 
> ping the systems it backs up and start a backup when it sees a system 
> come online.  You can also set a blackout period where backups only 
> occur at certain times of the day (ex: I have mine setup to try to 
> backup in the middle of the night).  If you have a system that is 
> normally shutdown you can set up the BIOS or WOL to wake up the machine 
> at the desired time.
>
> 3. You can choose what gets backed up on a system-by-system basis.  For 
> example you could choose to backup /etc /home and  /<music directory> 
> without backing up /<tv directory> on your myth backend.
>
> 4. You can choose how long you keep backups of various types to help you 
> keep within the amount of backup disk space you have.  For example I 
> keep full backups from 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 ,64 and 128 weeks ago. 
> Because it is smart enough to keep only one copy of each [identical] 
> file having 8 full backups does _not_ take 8 times as much disk space.
>
> There are tons of other good features too but I would be writing volumes 
> to describe them all.  Suffice it to say it has capabilities far 
> superior to any manual backups scheme.
>
> Combine BackupPC with LVM snapshots (you are using LVM, right?) and you 
> can have predictable, sane backups of all your important data.
>
> Jeff
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