Sanity Check

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Avo4Dayz

New Member
Aug 1, 2019
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Retooling my backup solution to have more space and failover potential.

I have 2 1U servers left over from an older project both identical with 4 3.5" bays. I am wanting to have a somewhat large network backup target. Mainly for accessible archived storage for potential later use. I have a few things that I need advice considering please.

So I know that RAID is not a backup, simple. But is RAID always better than no RAID? (Any mention of raid would be zfs based)

Would it be any wiser to run both servers with 4 separate volumes (1 per drive)?
-Pro would be any dead drive only loses it's own data, drives do not have to match.
--This would also have each drive backed up to the second server
-Cons 4 times the volumes to mount and manage from client machine

Option 2 is to run some form of RAID. RAID 10 vs RAID 5 is what is being considered, yes RAID 5 is dead and would almost guarantee failure in attempted rebuild when running 4 x 10TB drives. However am thinking, if I have an entire backup of the data then I wouldn't necessarily require a rebuild at all, create a new array and copy the data back. (Is that a crazy idea?)
RAID 10 would be best of course, but not wanting to lose that much storage in this environment yet, until expansion. So RAID 10 on both boxes with no backup. Which to me sounds crazy given lots of risk of data loss.

There are also two cheap NAS boxes that will run along side these both with 4 drive bays, but much much poorer performance. Will use in some way to

Advice? Thoughts? Suggestions?
 

MiniKnight

Well-Known Member
Mar 30, 2012
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You could DRBD across servers to pairs of drives in each server but that'd be terrible to manage.

I'd do RIAD 5 in both. You say you need the storage and I get that. If you can be down for a few hours to copy over from backup, then that's not so bad.
 
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Avo4Dayz

New Member
Aug 1, 2019
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You could DRBD across servers to pairs of drives in each server but that'd be terrible to manage.

I'd do RIAD 5 in both. You say you need the storage and I get that. If you can be down for a few hours to copy over from backup, then that's not so bad.
Thanks for prompt reply, I was mainly curious to see if i was entirely crazy thinking like this or not.