Software Raid 5 supported on OS X Server?

johnjosephbachirjohnjosephbachir
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
Does anyone know if OS X Server does software raid 5? I swear this used to be on the product page, but now I can't find anything anywhere about raid support in OS X Server.



Also, if OS X server doesn't do it, does anyone have any tricks/advice for the poor man's raid 5? I am making a backup system for a multimedia company's 1 terabyte central file server, so it needs to be large and reliable but not fast.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    jellytusslejellytussle Posts: 86member
    nope, RAID 0 or 1 only.



    How cheap do you need it to be?
  • Reply 2 of 8
    johnjosephbachirjohnjosephbachir Posts: 61member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Jellytussle

    nope, RAID 0 or 1 only.



    How cheap do you need it to be?



    Well, here's what i was GOING to do: get one of those 8 bay firewire 800 towers (sub $400), fill it with 250 gig drives, tie them together with software raid 5, then use retrospect to back up to them.



    so i was willing to pay $500 for os x server. so let's say i'm willing to spend up to $1,000 for the raid 5 part of the system.
  • Reply 3 of 8
    wmfwmf Posts: 1,164member
    Can Retrospect back up to multiple drives? I know it can use multiple CDs. Maybe you don't need RAID at all.
  • Reply 4 of 8
    johnjosephbachirjohnjosephbachir Posts: 61member
    yeah that's true. i realized that i had been thinking too hard about the whole problem. really a backup volume doesn't have to be all that fault tolerant (the main disk is already a raid 5, so this backup is just for human error). we already had a 1 ter lacie bigdisk sitting around, so i am just using retrospect desktop with that. the company owner is very pleased with the ~$1500 price reduction of my solution.
  • Reply 5 of 8
    jellytusslejellytussle Posts: 86member
    Except that those BigDisks are RAID 0, so you've gone from a solution that gave you the ability to survive a drive failure without downtime, to one that takes your entire backup down. A simple array of separate drives, or a JBOD would probably have been a more robust option. You could also look at rsync_hfs (used by RsyncX) for a volume to volume solution that walks all over Retrospect in this area.
  • Reply 6 of 8
    johnjosephbachirjohnjosephbachir Posts: 61member
    that's true. but even if the risk of failure is relatively high, the cost of failure is very low, we can just replace the unit and start backing up again (the chances of needing to use the backup on the very same day that the hardware fails are very low).



    the thing with rsync and other tools is that the client won't be able to use it easily after i leave. with retrospect they can just browse files with the gui.



    i know that retrospect keeps a log and only backs up changed files, and it says it keeps incrimental backups, so we can roll back to any given version of a file... one thing i need to investigate on monday is if it keeps old versions of files that have been deleted on the source volume. does anyone know?
  • Reply 7 of 8
    jellytusslejellytussle Posts: 86member
    Yes, it will keep data that has been deleted from the source until you do a recycle backup.
  • Reply 8 of 8
    johnjosephbachirjohnjosephbachir Posts: 61member
    that's great. although i guess the backup might potentially get really huge after a while. is there a way to retire files that were deleted X number of days ago?
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