Backup Question

[jminrod]

We have 4 servers that are being backed up every so many seconds to a NAS Server. We have 2 TB of space to use for this service. Now most of our files are on our main prinergy server which is Raid 5 As that gets filled we needed to move some files so we purchased a raid 5 5TB external drive. The problem is that it is not 100% guaranteed back up (So I am told) if 2 drives where to go down at the same time we would loose everything (So I am told).
My question or issue is my company no longer wants to keep purchasing the service for old jobs which is why we purchased the external drive so lets say in 1 year we used 1TB then those jobs continually get moved all through the next year, to the external, to make room for new incoming jobs.
We need to back up or mirror the 5TB External drive.
I am looking for the best way to go about this.
I am currently looking into Time Machine from apple but not sure if this will make it a 100% fool proof backed up system
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Jim

[Joe]

While it's true that if 2 drives die at the same time you will lose everything, the odds are in your favor that it probably won't happen. You could set it up as 2 separate RAID 5 arrays and your odds would go up even more. What are the odds of 4 drives failing simultaneously? But it can happen, ie...fire, flood, tornado, hurricane, meteorite. So you can keep one of the RAID 5 arrays offsite to guard against that. It's just a matter of playing the odds and just how safe do you really need to keep the data?

[jminrod]

Thanks Joe, Is this something I would have to copy twice or is there an easier way of taking care of this?
Do I just purchase another External drive and make a copy to each?
Can I set them up to mirror each other?
Do you know if Time Machine (Mac Software) would take care of this?

[pcmodem]

Do you keep all old jobs live on your system? IE: you ran a job 3 years ago and it is still on your system.

[jminrod]

In a sense yes. We can only keep so many live jobs on our working server. All of our live job reside there. As that starts getting filled we move the jobs to the external. Then If the job comes back for a reprint we copy the job back to the working server and rename it with a new job number. We use the external alot more for referencing old jobs with out copying but to make a job live it needs to go back to the working server

[Joe]

Thanks Joe, Is this something I would have to copy twice or is there an easier way of taking care of this?
Do I just purchase another External drive and make a copy to each?
Can I set them up to mirror each other?
Do you know if Time Machine (Mac Software) would take care of this?

If you are using the Prinergy Disk Archiving solution then yes it can do it automatically. Just set it to archive to the 2 different locations.

I don't think you can set it up to mirror each other but I'm not 100% sure on this.

Also I'm not sure if you can select multiple backup locations in Time Machine to backup to.

[jminrod]

unfortunately we don't have the archive feature we are only using Prinergy evo and not Prinergy Connect.

[pcmodem]

Anytime you have moving parts or heat. You have the potential for failure. We decided long ago to archive all of our old jobs onto CD (Back then), DVD (currently), and possibly BlueRay in the future. Granted it takes time to burn the disks and to retrieve them as well. But we know that not all of the jobs are going to be reprints and would just take up space on a Hard Drive.

When we burn DVD's we make 2 copies. One for production use and one for archiving off site for disaster purposes. If a production disk is gets damaged, we make a copy from the off site back disk.

[mattbeals]

You'd want to look to RAID6 and away from RAID5.

Configuring a RAID array isn't exactly the easiest thing to do. You may want to look to a SAN based on NAS devices from NetApp. These devices let you add storage as needed and help you schedule staging your data. There are a lot of ways to handle it. If you thing 5TB is all your ever going to need you can always mirror the RAID5 onto another RAID5. Do you really need to keep all of that as live data? Why not move it off to tape like LTO3/LTO4 and keep a copy at Iron Mountain? Heck, set up a service with Amazon's S3 service. Let them worry about data integrity. That's the easiest way of doing it, but it's going to require a big phat pipe going up to Amazon.

[otherthoughts]

We have 4 servers that are being backed up every so many seconds to a NAS Server. We have 2 TB of space to use for this service. Now most of our files are on our main prinergy server which is Raid 5 As that gets filled we needed to move some files so we purchased a raid 5 5TB external drive. The problem is that it is not 100% guaranteed back up (So I am told) if 2 drives where to go down at the same time we would loose everything (So I am told).
My question or issue is my company no longer wants to keep purchasing the service for old jobs which is why we purchased the external drive so lets say in 1 year we used 1TB then those jobs continually get moved all through the next year, to the external, to make room for new incoming jobs.
We need to back up or mirror the 5TB External drive.
I am looking for the best way to go about this.
I am currently looking into Time Machine from apple but not sure if this will make it a 100% fool proof backed up system
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Jim

• A link just to insure we are all clear about the intentions of the Backup vs. Archive
• A similar PrintPlanet thread discussing Back up And Archiving ....ideas that I thought would be worth the reading?

You'd want to look to RAID6 and away from RAID5.

Configuring a RAID array isn't exactly the easiest thing to do. You may want to look to a SAN based on NAS devices from NetApp. These devices let you add storage as needed and help you schedule staging your data. There are a lot of ways to handle it. If you thing 5TB is all your ever going to need you can always mirror the RAID5 onto another RAID5. Do you really need to keep all of that as live data? Why not move it off to tape like LTO3/LTO4 and keep a copy at Iron Mountain? Heck, set up a service with Amazon's S3 service. Let them worry about data integrity. That's the easiest way of doing it, but it's going to require a big phat pipe going up to Amazon.

No offense intended here Matt, just in search of greater clarity

More links - It's been a while since I retired, but the last I knew Storage Area Networks (SANs) were not based on Network-Attached Storage(NAS) devices. SANs and NASs were competing technologies with significant differences.

I've no doubts that there have been many advances in these areas of technology since I retired, so I may be confusing things here? If I am, please forgive my intrusion, if not, please clarify for us

Best Regards and great comments by all!
OT