Lr5 snafu

[Mark von Kanel]

Hi Colin, just looked at carbonite.... am i reading it correctly when it says i can back up my entire pc with unlimited storage? my main machine has 45tb of storage space!

Whats you experience with them like?

[ajohnw]

I've been wondering about this area. I have but haven't installed a 5 disc nas/server TBD aiming for one auto replace. Keep looking at cloud services.

Rackspace looks interesting. Pay as you go. Separate charges for storage and in and out.

Trouble is the upload speeds on ADSL remain appalling and will never match what I can get locally. In fact I have toyed with the idea of going diskless on my main machine.

John
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[davidedric]

Well, I'm just back from a couple of weeks in the African bush, and some things don't seem to change Still want to add my 2p worth, though. I'm another (retired ) IT professional with the scars to prove it (and anyone who thinks that transaction logs are a get out of jail card for recovery needs to try it a few times )

First, very glad that Wm.'s problems were resolved, and didn't need any extensive recovery remedies.

Second, any back strategy gives only an illusion of safety unless you regularly test that you can actually recover stuff - and that in turn means deciding what disaster recovery you wish to emulate (e.g. the difference between house-burned-down and hard-disk-failure). To give an example against myself. I have RAID disks, but have I tried replacing one to check that the new disk will re-build? No, I'm really fooling myself that all will be well, or at least that if one fails I can copy the other "somewhere" while it is still alive.

Thirdly, I think we are talking about three kinds of objects: original images, the applied edits, and the final images. I suspect that for each of us, the relative importance of the three would be different, and that means it would be quite rational to have different back-up strategies for each, and that in turn might influence the side car vs. Lightroom database decision.

Lastly, the crucial thing is to decide what disasters we each wish to guard against, and take appropriate action.

Now to get processing my holiday pictures, having secured them in my appropriate way!

Dave

[Colin Southern]

Hi Colin, just looked at carbonite.... am i reading it correctly when it says i can back up my entire pc with unlimited storage? my main machine has 45tb of storage space!

Whats you experience with them like?

Hi Mark,

Everything is perfect with them - except - upload speeds. At one point they used to throttle uploads (but not anymore), but for some reason I never seem to get more than 2 or 3 GB per day uploading ... despite having an internet connection that's capable of doing 432GB a day - so obviously something is getting restricted somewhere. Speed test to my ISP show around 42MB per second. Uploads to Google drive follow a weird sawtooth pattern from around 3mb/s up to 10mb/s then back to 3mb/s over the space of about a minute. Rinse and repeat. Carbonite - around 0.5mb/s. Hmmm.

All I can suggest is sign up for a free account (no credit card needed) and see what kind of upload you get.

[Colin Southern]

and anyone who thinks that transaction logs are a get out of jail card for recovery needs to try it a few times )

Unless you're planning on taking the database offline to back it up, then there isn't many alternatives

Just don't let them get too big between backups.

[Mark von Kanel]

i think ill put a NAS in my shed and run a hard wire connection.... its a good way away from the house. and i think ill remove the raid pool and set it to mirror, that should do the trick!

Comments welcome from you IT gurus.

[Colin Southern]

i think ill put a NAS in my shed and run a hard wire connection.... its a good way away from the house. and i think ill remove the raid pool and set it to mirror, that should do the trick!

Comments welcome from you IT gurus.

Increased chance of theft; no protection against virus, power-spike, "finger trouble".

[ajohnw]

There is some excellent power spike protection gear available. The very best is likely to bolt to the wall.

There are some simple precautions that can be read across from servers to NAS's in particular..

Why do they often have dual power supply slots - because it's reckoned to be the least reliable piece of kit.

Disks - some quote decent mtbf's although of late there seems to be a tendency to replace that with shear numbers so there is no need to take immediate notice of the server beeping away as it has found a disk fault. It's also possible to buy enterprise SATA. These in real terms are 10k scsi.

Some raid cards have a flash slot and battery back up. The battery back up aspect has been around for a long time to allow things to power down cleanly even if it's a power fail.

Back up the backup and don't leave that plugged into the system what ever it is. If tape use 3 rotationally and dispose and replace at suitable intervals. More than one what ever is used. There is a need really to check the backups but that requires a certain type of storage on them. On good stuff there is usually an option to back up and verify.

Virus - Colin is going to fall off his chair - run Linux on it and read up on "sandbox" and the merits of it's various flavours. Also apart from maybe coms no nas or server has any need to have the usual internet software on it. Actually if people buy a NAS they will be running Linux on it like it or not. Software updates on servers are tricky but hopefully no one can fake the sources. Really a specific piece of software would be ideal that just does that. On the other hand if it ain't broke why fix it.

I'd say don't run windows or mac at all but that's not feasible for many, At the moment Mac will be a safer. Fact of life.

Virus checkers do their job rather well. I would point people at AVG. Auto updates are the best option as it is with the operating system. AVG are one of the few that produce software to remove difficult virus. Afraid I don't rate Norton any more even though they do that as well. Trend Housecall can be used to check before installing. It's what they all use if users have odd problems even when it's been installed.

NAS's tend to have too little space in them. Servers too. Disks run hot and fail earlier for that reason. In some ways a slightly out of date under utilised server box is a better option.

Self healing storage formats are about but have only recently appeared over the horizon so last time I looked in Linux's case use wasn't recommended as it's early days. They do this by storing parity information etc so that data can even be recovered and not just checked. One is windows ReFS. There are others. The Linux one is Btrf. Get a life - no when I upgrade fully I have to choose what files storage format I want to use. There are several. Some info here but all offer the same sort of things and I don't think this fully covers all btrfs options.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs

ZFS is another and aught to be stable by now

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

Wired / wireless. Wired will generally be faster but there is a catch with the cards driving them. Buy say an HP machine and speed will probably match the spec. This often isn't the case with others. I'd still be inclined to feel that wired is faster particularly if there are a number of other wi fi connections active in the same area and it's a dedicated wire to the person that is using it.

Routers can also have a distinct bearing on speed if there are several users. Mine expects PPOE over ethernet so I have to use a converter but on the other hand it has way more capacity than a dedicate ADSL one. It's a D-Link box.The converter is a DrayTek bridge modem. Not many companies make these. Cisco is another option but can be rather difficult to set up for some. The speed problem with pure adsl routers is often down to enabling more and more of the extra facilities in them along with more than one user. Most of them don't give through put information anyway.

John
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[Manfred M]

Linux does not offer any inherent protection against viruses (I seem to remember the Apple OS crowd being fooled by the same logic). I assume Synology is running some form of Linux on their NAS boxes.

http://www.cso.com.au/article/551527...y_nas_devices/