At 06:12 PM 2/21/2005, Scott Phillips wrote:
Richard,
..are you using RAID disk technology for storage, and if so , what RAID
level ? This certainly is a consideration....
Hi, Scott,
Welcome to ARSC List!
If I had more money, I would be using RAID, but the costs of doing that
right now are higher than the approach I've taken.
I use ViceVersa Pro to automatically sync the work folders that new stuff
goes in, and I use Ghost to grab a snapshot of the operating environment
on
each of the PCs.
So, in essence, my system will be close to a RAID 1 (full mirroring), but
separated by two brick walls and 20 feet.
Ideally, each of the two stores would be RAID 5, but that is much more
expensive.
I'm using a LaCie Ethernet Disk as my basic NAS box and I am trying to
order a second without paying an arm and a leg penalty for being in
Canada.
They are 0.5TB native with two 250G drives in it. I have four Maxtor 250GB
"One Touch" external drives that will be two on each in the final setup.
Right now, all four are on one LaCie and are being mirrored in that
configuration.
The nice thing about the Ethernet Disk is the firewire port. I can add a
LaCie RAID array to it to replace the Maxtor drives at some point.
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10595
The Ethernet Disk itself is at
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10587
So, no, I'm not using RAID officially, just the concept of full mirroring
of one NAS store into the other.
It's possible to lose things, but not much will get lost. The sync is done
nightly. Some items are cloned the first time to the mirrored store, but
are not updated. Samplitude changes the date and time of some of the files
without actually changing the file. Since I edit in virtual mode or make
new files when I edit WAV files, I don't ever do destructive editing on
WAV
files, the original version of each file name is kept in the second
mirror.
In this way, I'm guarding against corruption of the WAV file. I do the
same
with Nikon RAW images. I might lose my parameter adjustment, but I don't
lose the raw capture. I also do that with JPEGs from the other digital
cameras, so if someone edits and crops the image, I back that up in one
place, but keep the original camera JPEG someplace else.
So for audio, the VIP files (the virtual projects) will be cloned and I'm
looking into keeping a complete daily history snapshot of these as well.
These are the ones that hold all the edits and they are small.
It's all rather complex and rule based, but it needs to be. When one
person
is dealing with the IT from the audio business, finance records, email, 2
kids' homework, image files from five digital cameras operated by four
people, and soon a good slide scanner, the data just piles up. I can't
afford to manage it manually, all I can do is monitor the automatic
management. Oh, and the second LaCie won't have any public shares. I'll be
running ViceVersa Pro on it in "pull" mode and it will be a "dark box" on
the network other than my ability to remote desktop into it behind my SPI
hardware firewall. I'll either push stuff out of it if needed or set up
one
share to drop files into, but I think no share is better.
I've spent about fifty hours this week on the backup. Nice thing about
having the flu--everything else was too annoying.
Cheers,
Richard
Richard L. Hess email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Vignettes
Media web: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/
Aurora, Ontario, Canada (905) 713 6733 1-877-TAPE-FIX
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