Raid vs rsync -

[Steven Rosenberg]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 11:04 AM, Bob Goodwin <bobgoodwin at wildblue.net> wrote:
> I had a mainboard fail in a box I use as a server, I moved the hard drive
> into old computer and carried on from there. Now I've replaced the board and
> intended to set it up using Raid to mirror two drives. However I have been
> wondering if it wouldn't work just as well to periodically rsync the drive
> in use with a second drive?

For me, it depends on how much data is involved and how safe you want it to be.

I would set up the Raid array and have either a third drive, or better
yet, a separate server for rsync.

Ideally the capacity of your rsync server would be many times that of
your main server's data so you could make backups daily, weekly and
monthly and save enough of them for file recovery in the event of
human error.

What usually happens is that a file is corrupted, by either man or
machine, and then that corrupted data goes to your backup, and you are
screwed.

If you have backups from different periods of time, at least you can
go back to an older backup and find a "good" copy of a file.

This might also be a good use case for either ZFS or btrfs, so you can
wind back the clock on file changes if there is trouble.

--
Steven Rosenberg
http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog
http://blogs.dailynews.com/click
stevenhrosenberg at gmail.com
steven at stevenrosenberg.net