Ask HN: Raid Alternatives? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Raid Alternatives?

2 pointsgiantg27 comments

I'm looking at replacing my current drives in my desktop. I was wondering what options are out there other than RAID for data protection. I'm not looking at a NAS currently, but I've heard there are some file/object storage technologies out there being used in place of RAID. I'm not sure if that's applicable/advantageous on a single desktop or not.

Looking for options that preferably support encryption and indexing.

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I think my ideal setup would be RAID in the computer itself(Although that's harder on laptops), a NAS with a non-redundant disk as an incremental target, and another 2 disks as a RAID pair just for storing large files, backed up to the backup disk.

That way everything has triple redundancy overall, and incrementals, and there's some archive space for stuff too big to fit on a laptop, but the incrementals don't have redundancy, and you never backup a backup(Which would break the deduplication feature or Borg).

What I actually do in reality, is try to keep everything important on my laptop drive, which I back up with Vorta to a USB hard disk, and some small important things live in Syncthing folders that are mirrored with my phone and tablet, because none of that is cheap.

For a single desktop, ironing out your incremental backup scheme first should come before worrying about raid.

Why do I need a backup scheme if I'm replicating with RAID? I'm not interested in offsite backups. I will occasionally do a backup of important files on another drive manually when i make changes.

Corrupted raid arrays happen. They can fail to rebuild. You can fat-finger rm -rf / or some other non-reversible command. There are many ways you can lose all your data even if you use RAID. If the burden of having a backup system is too much for you, then fine, feel free to ignore our standard advice.

Yeah, and backup systems can become corrupted too. I'm still going to be manually backing up sensitive files when I make changes to them. Most of my data isn't worth backing up. Going with RAID1 just means I won't have as much trouble with a drive failure, which seems to be more common than a controller failure, and which seems to be imminent on my one system right now. I guess I could just go with a backup system without RAID, but I don't see much difference between risk of the backup system failing vs the RAID controller failing, nor much difference between the backup vs a RAID1.

ZFS

Thanks! I'll look into that.

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