Backups and More

The last few days have been an interesting adventure in backups and why they are important. Around the beginning of December, one of my Mac Mini’s that I use as a “workstation” had a hard drive failure. The damn thing just beeps now but never fear I use Time Machine!

It appears that Time Machine can silently fail, for over a month with out a single warning. At this point, I got relatively pissed off. I lost about a month of pictures, virtual machine changes and other stuff on this computer. There were no other backups besides this, so I am pretty much screwed when it comes to this data. I am lucky that I did not lose any code as I keep everything hosted on github.

I accepted the data loss and went about trying to get a cost effective solution for my needs. After about a week of looking for a hardware solution, that would support my ESXi server and Time Machine on my Macs, I settled on a NetGear ReadyNAS Ultra 4 and 5 2TB Western Digital consumer grade desktop drives. The ReadyNAS arrived a few weeks ago and I excitedly installed four of the five drives and let it start building the RAID array. The estimated time to build the array was around 10 hours. I went along doing other things checking on it periodically to see the progress. Around six hours into the build it went into life support mode claiming “drive 3” was failing. This was fairly upsetting as I just purchased the drives. I took drive three out and tried again. This time drive two failed after about 17 hours on the factory reset. I had some serious "what the fuck" moments over the holiday but this one took the cake. I took all of the drives out, did a factory reset, placed a different combination of the drives into the NAS, and did a factory reset to let the raid rebuild. After twenty or so hours the drive rebuild completed and everything seemed to be up and running.

One of the best features of the ReadyNAS was the support for ISCSI. As an avid user of VMware this is great for me. So my first order of business was to test ISCSI. This was fairly straightforward to setup, as it took less than five minutes to setup a target and have it working on the ESXi server. I was able to move several virtual machines over to the NAS and run them with no problems at all.

The next feature I was really looking to get from the ReadyNAS was the Time Machine support. The process of enabling the Time Machine support took about three clicks and everything was setup and ready to go. I started testing with a desktop of about 60GB of data. This went fairly fast with no hitches.

The ReadyNAS has been running for two weeks straight and hasn’t had a single issue yet. I would highly recommend the ReadyNAS to anyone that is looking for a home/small business storage solution. I am really happy with this purchase.