[mythtv-users] warning for anyone with western digital green drives

[Jeff Siddall]

On 02/16/2012 01:26 PM, Mike Perkins wrote:
> On 16/02/12 17:45, PJR wrote:
> Of course, if you run your backup process on the same system that you're backing
> up, you're leaving yourself open to failures which affect the box, aren't you?
> Unless you have access to a tape system which can hold your Terabytes of video,
> that's going to leave you in a similar position to no backup at all, or at least
> make it very difficult to recover.

Correct, it is better to run your backups on another machine but even 
without that running a non-redundant primary device and a separate 
backup device still buys many advantages:

- Separate filesystem for primary and backup disk, so corruption of the 
primary FS does not also destroy the backup (like RAID would)

- Different disk size/manufacturer/connectivity for the backup disk 
reduces chances of multiple concurrent disk failures.  Ex: I had a PS 
failure that fried (literally -- smoke came out of one drive) an 
internal drive but my external USB backup drive was fine.

-"User errors" like accidentally deleting a file, are recoverable with a 
backup system but not with RAID.

- Taking a snapshot of the backup disk (for offsite backups) is easy and 
doesn't [directly] affect the performance of the primary disk.

-The backup disk can contain backups for other systems whereas RAID 
can't easily

etc...

Jeff