Backup volume issues

[mtbc]

I have backups working well enough but I can't shake the feeling that things could be better. They certainly should be. After having seen some I/O errors last Fall I have now gone through two operating systems (fearing a USB driver issue in the first), three sets of USB cables and two drive manufacturers and I still see the occasional error which for backup volumes is intolerable. These are USB3.0 2.5" mechanical portable 2TB drives.

Furthermore, our powerline ethernet adaptor pair appears to be buggy: they can work well but when they fall offline they then require manual intervention. Reading reviews of other manufacturers' suggests that many adaptors available in Britain are poor in that way for at least some owners. This makes it hard to run the house's backups when some machines are on one side of the pair and some on the other.

Also, even having switched operating system, backup drive performance remains slow. NetBSD still has raw devices though the cryptographic driver examples never use the raw; I am not clear on the difference. I can write large chunks of data to the raw device at 80MB/s which is quite acceptable. However, I am rsync'ing filesystems, not writing archives: I want easy browsing and random access. With smaller writes or using the regular device I am down to more like 2MB/s which is tolerable but dreadful. The cryptographic aspect seems to add negligible overhead; backups do not seem CPU-bound.

I wish I saw some easy alternative. Despite our slow ADSL the drives could be less portable if I could reach off-site backups over the network but I don't want to pay a non-trivial monthly fee for sizable remote storage; my remote servers are cheap low-capacity ones. I don't have an easy alternative way to connect upstairs networking to downstairs: being in a rented house I am not about to drill holes for and route cabling. The computers are just compact systems with SSDs; USB drives are the only way I see to grant them large storage. I would like to avoid having to buy a third batch of external drives or at least have a stronger sense that I could rely on such.

Comments

[wpadmirer]

External drives are really iffy. I have my stuff backed-up with Carbonite. It's relatively inexpensive, and seems to work very nicely for me.

[mtbc]

Ah, I'm a bit of a privacy nut so I don't like my data to be on the corporate cloud. I may well be quite irrationally averse though!

[wpadmirer]

Yeah, Pat's the same way. But his is artwork, and he doesn't want anyone else to have access. I just figure no one else is interested in my partially complete novel. (grin)

[emperor]

Could you sneaker-net an offsite into the office? I host offline offsite for some friends (and from time to time I swap the offsite for a new one when requested).

You read as frustrated that the backups are slower and perhaps less reliable than you'd like, but it sounds like they are broadly working - you have at least some backups of all the machines you want backing up?

I want to update my backup arrangements at some point, and am planning on getting a SATA/USB caddy and just using normal SATA drives rather than ones that come in a USB enclosure; IYSWIM. Since the enclosures often seem a bit rubbish, I think this will probably result in more reliable hardware.

Network-wise, we ran a long cat5 cable for intra-house networking where wireless wasn't good enough; it might not have been pretty, but it worked reliably :)

[mtbc]

The relevant computers are very poorly located for trying to run a long cable. (-: I may yet resort to lightly taping to the ceiling, we'll see.

Yeah, sneaker-net is how I've done offsites for years. The backups are apparently broadly working, it's just that the past year is the first I've really run into I/O errors at all with them: even, say, fifteen years ago when my backups were still small enough to fit onto DVD-RAM cartridges they remained solid. (I miss pelican.cam.ac.uk!)

So, you expect regular SATA drives plugged into a USB caddy to be rather more reliable than the drives that come already sealed into a little portable case with a USB port?

[emperor]

I think the enclosure bit of external drives if often a bit cheap-and-shit, so yes, I think a reasonably-competent external SATA cradle and then bog standard SATA drives is likely to be more reliable than a bunch of external drives. I may be wrong!