Gadgetory

there's a video coming soon a video about the catastrophic failure of the raid array on our 2010 byte SSD server codename Wanek but before we do that video why don't we take a moment to introduce to you the newest member of the Linus Media Group server family the one I was literally in the process of backing Wanek up to when the failure happened meet plover server the Logitech G 303 features a lightweight design and advanced optical sensor with Delta zero technology for precise tracking and RGB lighting to match your setup check out the link in the video description to learn more so I think a video about clover server has to start with the differences between backup and redundancy redundancy protects from a hardware failure to an extent but not from accidental deletion encryption by ransomware vandalism or what I would call catastrophic hardware failure the benefit of redundancy is that it's real time a single Drive failure in a raid 5 array for example would allow the business to keep operating completely normally and would result in 0 lost data as long as it could be offloaded or the raid array could be rebuilt with backups you'll only get back whatever was in your last periodic backup so clover server wouldn't have prevented any data loss from the catastrophic raid failure that recently occurred with Wanek server one of the raid cards crapped all over the inside of its pants took its pants off and started swinging them around what it would have prevented was projects that have already been shot weeks ago but not yet edited like this video that we had planned for Channel super-fun from being entirely lost so let's take a look at the hardware clover server is using a quad-core xeon processor on an asus p9 DM server motherboard with 32 gigs kingston ECC ddr3 memory to give me the best possible stability of course the redundant power supply from ISTAR USA helps with that and the tool list case well okay that's just for convenience but the hot swappable drive bays are really really nice ignore that RAID controller you see in this footage that's going to be replaced with an LSI HBA and I've also added a ten gigabit network card to handle the workload alterations that I've made since I built this box for storage I've gone with eight of Seagate's eight terabyte enterprise capacity drives these suckers do in the neighborhood of 200 megabytes per second and have a rated mean time between failure of two million hours however whatever the reliability might be in this particular application where the intent is to achieve reasonable speed but more importantly extraordinarily safe backup remember this will be the only copy of some data in the event of Wanek pooping itself again I'll be giving up a lot of my capacity to the redundancy gods as well as the speed gods so like most of our servers these days the software side of things starts with a fresh install of lime Tech's on raid which by the way they have sponsored projects of ours but this isn't one of them so we'll be setting up two of our eight terabyte drives in what is effectively an eight terabyte raid 1 array configuration and then we'll take the other six in a butter FS raid 10 for 24 terabytes of redundant storage the plan for the 8 terabyte array is pretty straightforward I'm going to set up a Windows Server 2012 r2 essentials VM a pretty simple process since I don't have to do any video card pass-through or anything like that if you want to learn more though about on raid VN setup you can check out our to gamers 1 cpu video here I chose essentials 2012 r2 because even though it's quite expensive at about $500 for a license the way it handles incremental backup and restore functionality for up to 25 computers is really slick and seamless not to mention that if we ever wanted to move to a domain setup it includes Active Directory domain services for now we're still using a workgroup so I did have to use this simple workaround to enable the nightly backup functionality without requiring the PCs to join a domain from there you download and setup the connector software and this is basically a quick look at the dashboard that allows you to set the schedule for nightly backups how long you want to keep them for and change the storage destination to the secondary V disks that I created for those backups so seven terabytes should be lots for our SSD equipped workstations here in the office alright then Linus but what about that 24 terabytes of RAID 10 storage on this machine great question I've got two plans for that number one is to use beyond compare a great piece of software that compares the structure of two directories and allows you to set up all kinds of rules for copying one way copying the other way or synchronizing between them and I'm going to use that to do incremental synchronizations so this is kind of somewhere between redundancy and backup since I plan to run them every 30 minutes or so and I'm setting up the relationship so that a deleted file on Wanek will be removed on the clover server side as well then every night I will set up a backup operation from clover to the vault where files deleted from Wanek and therefore clover server will not be removed from the vault so we have somewhere to turn to if we accidentally delete something major so those operations can both be scheduled simply with windows task manager super handy and then a monthly or whenever we feel like it cleansing of the deleted stuff on the vault can be done using beyond compare as well now this isn't a perfect solution but butter FS snapshotting is still a ways out so it'll have to do for now and we've got lots of space on the vault so I'm not too worried about it anyway that still only accounts for about another 20 terabytes of the space on clover so we've got 5 terabytes of wiggle room for that plan number two I'm going to be leveraging my CEO nests to use that extra space as an off-site backup for my nas at home using CrashPlan normally I'd actually have to run crash plan from within a win environment or at least something with a GUI but the benefit of using docker within unready to do it I do plan to do a full video about docker containers and why they're awesome in the future is that if windows Bork's up crash plans backing up of key files there's not enough left over space for my whole home array will be uninterrupted normally setting up crash plan on a headless machine is kind of a nightmare but unraised way is a bit more elegant so in summary there's three main points for this video one backups are important to create two backups of something that's important during a data migration and three more details on the catastrophic raid failure to come speaking of catastrophic have you ever been in a situation where you're like I want to watch American Netflix but I am NOT American or I am American and I'm not in America well Tunnel bear is the easy to use VPN app for that and all kinds of stuff Tunnel bear lets you tunnel to 16 different countries allowing you to browse the Internet and use online services as if you are in a different country they've got apps for iOS Android PC and Mac and they've also got a Chrome extension when you pick a country and turn tunnel bear on two things happen your connection gets encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption and your public IP address gets switched so that you show up as if you are in that other country and they've fixed all the annoying stuff that's frustrating about VPNs while offering 500 megabytes of data for free to try it out with no credit card required then if you want to upgrade to unlimited data you can save 10% by going to tunnel bear comm slash ltte which is linked in the video description alright so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon instructions for how to do that or up there buying a cool shirt like this one or with a direct monthly contribution through our community forum you get a cool little contributor badge now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so check out that little button in the top right corner to see our video on channel super fun where Taryn and Luke compete to see who can wrap presents with drunk goggles on the best trust me it's better than it sounds