Raid to raid backup, best system?

[steve00]

I’ve got a Windows 2003 server with two RAID 5 disk arrays attached directly to the server. The primary one contains a folder with about 4.5 million fairly small files in it and growing. I’ve copied over this folder to the secondary raid as a backup and now want to ensure that as new data is created on the primary raid it’s automatically backed up onto the second one.

What I would like to know is what you would recommend to backup the data on the first RAID to the second on an on-going basis?

Many thanks.

 

[dberg35]

For starters a RAID5 is geared for redundancy but there should always be a backup but not to another RAID5. Check out this link to Symantec.

http://www.symantec.com/business/so...siness_owners&solfid=sb_sol_prevent_info_loss

As for RAID configurations please take a moment and look at this.

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

 

[58sniper]

If those arrays are both on the same controller, you still have a single point of failure. You'd be better off having those go to another server via DFS.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[steve00]

Thanks for the replies guys, going to take a look at the links you posted now to see your thoughts.

I know that as I am using RAID5 I have redundancy but I want to protect myself from device failure as well.

 

[steve00]

58sniper, they are both connected to the same server. One is connected via a SCSI card, the other using the network card and iscsi. So same machine, different connections.

Ideally yes another server and dfs would be nice but this is the situation I have and I need to find the best way to automatically backup data from one array to another.

 

[steve00]

dberg35 I have looked at the Symantec link and it’s more a best practices for backup rather than a solution to automatically backing up large amounts of data from one drive to another.

Someone has mentioned dfs, the server is running 2003 (not R2) so this may be an option. Any other ideas other than dfs?

 

[58sniper]

You could run robocopy as a scheduled task.....

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[dberg35]

It is Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery. You can recover anything from data to the whole server and do so quickly. And you can backup to another drive either on the server or external.