Our Storage Server Crashed – Meet the New Backup Server
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,588 words · ~7 min read
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there's a video coming soon a video about the catastrophic failure of the
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rid array on our 20 terb SSD server code
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name wanck but before we do that video
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why don't we take a moment to introduce to you the newest member of the lonus
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Media Group server family the one I was literally in the process of backing W up
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to when the failure happened meet Clover
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server
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the Logitech g303 features a lightweight design an advanced Optical sensor with
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Delta zero technology for precise tracking and RGB lighting to match your
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setup check out the link in the video description to learn more so I think a
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video about Clover server has to start with the differences between backup and
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redundancy redundancy protects from a hardware failure to an extent but not
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from accidental deletion encryption by
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ransomware vandalism or what I would call catastrophic Hardware failure the
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benefit of redundancy is that it's real time a single drive failure in a raid
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five array for example would allow the business to keep operating completely
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normally and would result in zero lost data as long as it could be offloaded or
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the raate array could be rebuilt with backup you'll only get back whatever was
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in your last periodic backup so Clover
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server wouldn't have prevented any data
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loss from the catastrophic raid failure that recently occurred with wanik server
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one of the raid cards crapped all over the inside of its pants took its pants
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off and started swinging them around what it would have prevented was
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projects that have already been shot weeks ago but not yet edited like this
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video that we had planned for Channel Super Fun from being entirely lost so
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let's take a look at the hardware Clover server is using a quad core xon
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processor on an ASUS p9d M Server Motherboard with 32 gigs of Kingston ECC
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DDR3 memory to give me the best possible stability of course the Redundant power
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supply from istar USA helps with that and the toolless case well okay that's
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just for convenience but the hot swappable Drive bays are really really
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nice ignore that RAID controller you see in this footage that's going to be
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replaced with an LSI HBA and I've also added a 10 GB network card to handle the
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workload alterations that I've made since I built this box for storage I've
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gone with eight of seagate's 8 tbte Enterprise capacity drives these suckers
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do in the neighborhood of 200 megabytes per second and have a rated meantime
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between failure of two million hours
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however whatever their reliability might be in this particular application where
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the intent is to achieve reasonable speed but more importantly
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extraordinarily safe backup remember this will be the only copy of some data
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in the event of wanic pooping itself again I'll be giving up a lot of my
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capacity to the redundancy Gods as well as the speed
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Gods so like most of our servers these
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days the software side of things starts with a fresh install of limex unraid
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which by the way they have sponsored projects of but this isn't one of them
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so we'll be setting up two of our 8 TB drives in what is effectively an 8 tbte
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raid one array configuration and then we'll take the other six in a butter FS
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RAID 10 for 24 tab of redundant storage
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the plan for the 8 tbte array is pretty
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straightforward I'm going to set up a Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials VM a
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pretty simple process since I don't have to do any video card pass through or
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anything like that if you want to learn more though about unraid VM setup you
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can check out our two Gamers 1 CPU video here I chose Essentials 2012 R2 because
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even though it's quite expensive at about $500 for a license the way it
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handles incremental backup and restore functionality for up to 25 computers is
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really slick and seamless not to mention that if we ever wanted to move to a
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domain setup it includes active directory domain Services although for
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now we're still using a work group so I did have to use this simple workaround
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to enable the nightly backup functionality without requiring the PCS
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to join a domain from there you download and set up the connector software and uh
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this is basically a quick look at the dashboard that allows you to set the
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schedule for nightly backups how long you want to keep them for and change the
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storage destination to the secondary V disk that I created for those backups so
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7 tabt should be lots for our SSD equipped workstations here in the office
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all right then lonus but what about that 24 terab of RAID 10 storage on this
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machine great question I've got two plans for that number one is to use
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Beyond Compare a great piece of software that compares the structure of two
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directories and allows you to set up all kinds of rules for copying One Way
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copying the other way or synchronizing between them and I'm going to use that
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to do incremental synchronizations so this is kind of somewhere between
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redundancy and backup since I plan to run them every 30 minutes or so and I'm
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setting up the relationship so that a deleted file on wanic will be removed on
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the Clover server side as well then
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every night I will set up a backup operation from Clover to the Vault where
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files deleted from wanic and therefore Clover server will not be removed from
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the Vault so we have somewhere to turn to if we accidentally delete something
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major so those operations can both be scheduled simply with Windows Task
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Manager uh super handy and then a monthly or whenever we feel like it
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cleansing of the deleted stuff on the Vault can be done using Beyond Compare
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as well now this isn't a perfect solution but butter FS snapshotting is
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still a ways out so it'll have to do for now and we've got lots of space on the
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Vault so I'm not too worried about it anyway that still only accounts for
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about another 20 terabytes of the space on Clover so we've got 5 terabytes of
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wiggle room for that plan number two I'm going to be leveraging my ceon to use
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that extra space as an off-site backup for my Nas at home using crash plan
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normally I'd actually have to run crash plan from within a Windows environment
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or at least something with a goey but the benefit of using Docker within
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unraid to do it I do plan to do a full video about Docker containers and why
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they're awesome in the future is that if Windows borks up crash plans backing up
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of key files there's not enough leftover space for my whole home array will be
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uninterrupted normally setting up crash plan on a
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headless machine is kind of a nightmare but unraid way is a bit more elegant so
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in summary there's three main points for this video One backups are important two
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create two backups of something that's important during a data migration and
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three more details on the catastrophic raid failure to come speaking of
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catastrophic have you ever been in a situation where you're like I want to
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out with no credit card required then if you want to upgrade to unlimited data
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you can save 10% by going to Tunnel bear.com LT which is linked in the video
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description all right so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you
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watch next so check out that little button in the top right corner to see
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our video on Channel Super Fun where uh Taran and Luke compete to see who can
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wrap present with drunk goggles on the V
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trust me it's better than it sounds