RAID? Was: PATA hard disks, anyone?

[Alexander Schreiber]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 01:17:08PM -0400, Ethan via cctalk wrote:
> > I know of no RAID setup that can save me >from stupid.
> 
> I use rsync. I manually rsync the working disks to the backup disks every
> week or two. Working disks have the shares to other hosts. If something
> happens to that data, deleted by accident or encrypted by malware. Meh.
> 
> Hardware like netapp and maybe filesystems in open source have those awesome
> snapshot systems with there is directory tree that has past time version of
> data. A directory of 15 minutes ago, one of 6 hours ago, etc is what we had
> setup at a prior gig.

At a prior job, I replaced the standard NFS+Samba filesharing mess (with
the regular "I need you to twiddle permissions" fun) with an AFS server.
Native clients for both Linux and Windows2000. With access to the ACLs
built right into the native interfaces, so that regular call went away.

Also, AFS is built around volumes (think "virtual disks") and you have
the concept of a r/w volume with (potentially) a pile of r/o volumes
snapshotted from it. So one thing I did was that every (r/w) volume
had a directory .backup in its root where there was mounted a r/o
volume snapshooted from the r/w volume around midnight every day.

That killed about 95% of the "I accidently deleted $FILE, can you please
dig it out of the backup" calls.

Plus, it made backups darn easy.

Last I heard, after I left that place, they setup a second AFS server.

Oh, AFS as in: the Andrew File System

Kind regards,
           Alex.
-- 
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