Dobleve

Over the years I’ve heard horror stories from friends who lost their photos when a hard drive on their computer crashed.  Another recent crash reminded of the pain.  With upwards of 30,000 photos and 100,000 music files stored on a computer in our house (which we also moved 9,000 miles), I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to ensure we don’t lose any of those precious files…..  

Caution/Cuidado, random boring technical junk to follow.  I thought I’d give a brain-dump of the system we use at our house, perhaps it is something you can use too, or, even better, I’ve missed something and you’ll tell me how to fix it before another one of our hard drives crashes.

We have a central server in our house with a RAID-5 array of 3 400GB hard drives, giving us roughly 800GB of space.  The only catch is you have to monitor this, its designed to keep working even if a drive fails and it does just that without a hitch – until a second drive fails, then the whole array needs to be recovered.  Our server is running Windows Server 2003, which has a neat feature known as “Timewarp” or “Volume Snapshots”.  This automatically saves versions of files for later recovery in a very space-efficient way.  Eg. if we accidentally delete a photo or otherwise corrupt it we can revert back to the older version from any PC in the house without having to find the copy on our backup drive.

We back up our server onto removable hard drives.  I use a generic external 1394 drive case which I plug various drives into when I need to do a backup.  My backup software is simple, a tool called “Robocopy” in the Windows Resource Kit, you can get it free here.  It has a mode of copying that will mirror one directory to another, perfect for backing up data.  

One key of our backup system is that it is on external hard drives and they are not connected to the server except when doing a backup.  This helps protect from virus’s and power spikes.  We have multiple backup drives and not all of them are stored in our home in case of a real disaster.  

The other key is the data is stored on the backup drives in a plain format – when you plug one of our backups into any other PC you can immediately access the data without needing special restore software.

We lose 1-2 hard drives per year (we have a lot of hard drives).  Expecting it to happen and practice with it happening rather than dreading it has kept us safe from data loss for a long time, I hope it continues.