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Comment by ff0066mote | Hacker News Reader

Not related to Drobo:

I use a cron script which runs rsync each hour and synchronizes my / and /home/ with my /mnt/mirror/.

Ever since I've set this up, I've had a reliable backup which I don't have to think about. I've even migrated my system to it once, because I needed to swap the primary hard drive out.

What's the big deal about backing up? Why buy a dedicated unit anyway? Am I missing something fundamental?

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Unless such a backup is versioned it seems all you have is a system that automatically erases your backup one to two hours after a soft failure.

This.

If your primary drive beings to silently corrupt data due to bad sectors (I've had this happen once. Your system starts to hang, applications start to unexpectedly quit, you start hearing static/clicks in your music, photos seem jaggy even if they were taken with a 10MP DSLR.) you will back up bad/corrupt data over your backed up good data.

rsync won't delete extra files at the destination unless you tell it to. Although, there's still the problem of syncing corrupted stuff to the mirror. Keeping multiple versions is certainly more robust, in any case.

I was using "erase" figuratively.

Well, that works well. The draw of Drobo is a RAID setup though - in some cases, RAID provides a significant performance boost, and, at higher levels, it'll survive more than one drive failure.

Ah, I didn't think of that and it makes sense. Thank you.

If speed isn't a concern, that's great. I really like linux software raid, mdraid. It's FAST and it makes the drives portable between hardware.

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