Memeo has saved my bacon numerous times. Even a complete hard drive failure on my wife’s machine (although a nuisance) was uneventful data-wise — nothing was lost. Once all of the software and drivers were reinstalled, Memeo restored everything in a matter of 75 minutes. (That sounds like a lot of time, but my wife’s machine has boatloads of music and family photos.)

We have legit copies of Memeo on all our machines — except for my Ubuntu laptop. Rachel, put in a good word with your bosses about coming up with a Linux/Debian/Ubuntu equivalent.

Thanks
Martin

One is to combine the storage of all the devices so that they show up as one large drive on your Operating System. This option is what I believe Leo was using, but I may be wrong. I do know that on this setting if your RAID card goes down you lose all your data on all the drives.

Another is where you have at least 2 drives (or more) with the exact same storage capacity and they show up on your Operating System as 1 drive with the size of one of the single drives. The reason it only has the space of one of the drives is because it mirrors all the data onto all the drives attached so if one of them goes down or your RAID card goes down you do not lose any data. This is the backup (maybe there are more) setting of RAID. It is basically to keep you safe if one of the drive’s die.

That’s my knowledge of RAID. I’m sure there are other ways that RAID works but those are the 2 I know about. I have an uncle who was using the first setting and lost a bunch of data so now he is using the second one for backup’s.

A true and critical backup should always off site via physically. transporting it or backing up online. The “backups” I have at home or more for opps moments as if my primary hardware goes bad but if my house caught on fire, etc. it wouldn’t make a difference.

I haven’t noticed any of those Jungle Disk issues someone else mentioned. Of course I don’t backup everything via Jungle disk that would take forever and cost more but I do backup about 2-3 gigs worth of stuff. The cost is very minimal but I have always said if you lost your primary copy almost all backup solutions will be a bargain.

Having said this, you can use Drobo’s to achieve data security: you would have to buy two of them, plus two of their Ethernet addons; equip them with roughly equivalent disk space; store them in physically separate locations (so that one disaster cannot destroy both of them) that both have high-speed Internet access (and I do mean high-speed); and then use their web update model to keep both boxes in sync. Expensive, but it is safe.

At home, I am running a server (Windows 2003, but you could use any technology for that). All 3 machines on our network are backed up to that server every night. I keep backup copies of “static” material (e.g. older pictures, the bulk of the mp3 library, etc.) on two sets of DVD’s, one set is kept out of house. The server uses Mozy to run a backup of frequently changing data every night into “the cloud”. I regard this combination as reasonably safe.

RAID systems with redundancy continue working without interruption when one, or sometimes more, disks of the array fail, although they are vulnerable to further failures. When the bad disk is replaced by a new one the array is rebuilt while the system continues to operate normally. Some systems have to be shut down when removing or adding a drive; others support hot swapping, allowing drives to be replaced without powering down. RAID with hot-swap drives is often used in high availability systems, where it is important that the system keeps running as much of the time as possible.
RAID is not a good alternative to backing up data. Data may become damaged or destroyed without harm to the drive(s) on which it is stored. For example, part of the data may be overwritten by a system malfunction; a file may be damaged or deleted by user error or malice and not noticed for days or weeks; and of course the entire array is at risk of catastrophes such as theft, flood, and fire.

RAID was never meant to be a backup solution. It is a solution for redundancy/high availability. RAID (not the same thing as a drobo) keeps things running. Drives are more likely to fail than the data sub-system, IDE, SCSI, SATA. So RAIDs, just keep your data available, not as backup/archives. A drobo is just a way to have lots of room for data. Anyone that things their data is “safe” on a drobo by itself has been mislead. I use JungleDisk, but you can use anything that can be located off site. Tapes, external drives, Iomega Jazz drives (or whatever) are just a part of a smart solution. RAID keeps your data available, backups keep your data secure.

Make copies. Put them somewhere else. Data safe.
Use RAID. Data available.

Also, browsing your files is not all that simple. It uses whacky naming conventions, whereas a piece of software like S3 Bucket Explorer will let you name the fulders/buckets whatever you want.

The problem with S3 Bucket Explorer — as slick as it is — is that it does not provide a drive letter for you to integrate with your backup solution(s). All operations have to be manual…at least for the time being (even though they promised the backup/sync feature back in early 08 and it never happened).

I also have tried Carbonite. It has the flat annual rate going for it, though I suspect that’s a ruse to get new customers and then jack up the price — after all, who’s going to want to back up all their data again once it’s off-site? I have yet to find a software bundle that is not ugly and slow when it comes to recovering your files.

As for JungleDisk, getting that monthly bill from Amazon Web Services can hurt a little bit, but you have to view it as a security investment. I also use SyncBack locally. It sounds like we have pretty much the same setup, Cliff.

Even given all that, I prefer S3 Bucket Explorer since i can just drag a folder and tell it to overwrite all similar files. It works like Windows Explorer, so there’s no learning curve. There’s no whacky 24-character hashes before my folder name.

Good luck!
Jeremy

For the other machines in the house, I’m thinking about getting a time capsule and just letting them use that.