On 1 July 2014 09:20, <zlinw@mcmedia.com.au> wrote:
I have been reading the "btrfs/ZFS, sans raid and bitrot" thread and a number of thoughts and questions spring to mind.
I get the impression that some are looking for a single reliable storage solution to avoid having to do backups.
Surely this is impossible, I certainly would ______NEVER______ (excuse the shouting) ever trust my life to a single system if at all possible. When one is doing instrument flying training as a pilot you are constantly told never to rely on a single instrument but scan all of them and come up with an overall coherent picture. If one relies in such circumstances on a single point of failure you __will__ kill yourself.
One is told raid or any such thing is a reliabilty strategy __not__ a backup strategy.
Correct and all good points. But even when you've got a good back-up system of a RAID array (btrfs/zfs not withstanding) any bitrot gets backed up too. This happened to me on my media server - 2 disks in a mirrored set had corrupted TV episodes on them which in turn were sent to the back-up in the corrupted state. Software raid didn't know about the corruption and dutifully carried on keeping the corrupted data. Fortunately I have the original DVDs from which I could re-rip the corrupted episodes. So I've switched to zfs and I back-up to two separate places (also on zfs). Weekly scrub ops detect and correct data as best they can. -- Colin Fee tfeccles@gmail.com