Re: [tlug] Hard Drive Failure (Was: Help! Total hardware failure)

["Mark Makdad" <makdad@example.com>]

On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 3:22 PM, <tlug@example.com> wrote:

You said that you bought a new hard drive, and I immediately notice a problem:
it is singular and not plural.  I would recommend investing in more than one
hard drive and using RAID to store any data that you want to protect from a
future hard drive failure.

Having just experienced what Dave encountered about one month ago, and since the thread seems to have turned more to data loss prevention as opposed to recovery, I'll offer my two cents.

I purchased a Buffalo NAS unit that contains two 500-GB drives in a RAID 1 mirrored array.  Should one drive die, I can insert another drive of the same size and the device will duplicate for me.  The unit sits on my home LAN, and any picture, spreadsheet, or otherwise low-volume file will get accessed directly from the unit.  It cost 36,000 JPY at Yodobashi.

For high-volume files (e.g. my Windows XP VirtualBox environment file, which is 3GB), I also routinely back up the file to the NAS (as running it from the NAS would likely lead to performance issues).  For me, the most annoying thing about an HD crash is re-customizing your system.  This is one nice thing about virtualization.  I'd be open to hear other ideas though, such as backing up just my /etc directory as I believe Curt was proposing.  I think my skill level is not yet at a point where I feel comfortable to do this without serious hand-holding.

Additionally, I set up a VPN on my home server and set up a client on my laptop, which I use with an eMobile card.  My laptop mounts the NAS as a network drive, and I similarly access all of my spreadsheets, files, and music from the NAS even when I'm away from home.

Single source of truth... but it's also a single source of failure.

Either way, for a 40,000 JPY investment, when a new drive will cost you 10,000 JPY anyway, I'd say it's a fantastic deal.  It has 2 drives included-- half the cost of the hardware are the drives themselves.

Mark