I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to one of the more important folders on a Windows machine. It’s one of those that you don’t normally see, and if you don’t back it up, you will come to regret it.

The folder is known as the “Application Data” folder, and in Windows 7 is located at:

C:\Users\Justin Gehring\AppData

This folder contains data used in your applications, and many times, it’s extremely important data. (Many times, it’s also not important at all). Some things you can often find in this folder include:

• Your email inbox and folders (Both Thunderbird and Outlook put their local folder storage in here)
• Settings files for your FTP Clients/etc that may store important configuration details you’ve long since forgotten.
• Some software programs store their license keys here.
• If you use Bitcoin, your wallet is often stored in here (which without, you’ll lose all your bitcoins in a crash).
• Log files for programs such as Skype are also stored here.

When backing up your data, I strongly encourage backing up EVERYTHING in the C:\Users Folder… even those pesky temp files. Don’t make the mistake of backing up just your My Documents folder… It’s not enough!

Backblaze of course does this automatically (If you haven’t caught that from my previous posts).

Anytime I rebuild my PC, I tend to start asking myself if it’s time to upgrade any other components in my system. I don’t need to have the fastest system in the world, but I do like to be as productive as possible, and not fall behind the curve. At the moment, I’m still where I liked to be, which is surprising considering my computer is 3+ years old.  In fact, not only is is still keeping me fairly happy, but it’s also still outclocking most of the other computers in my life. Just to summarize what’s in it at the moment:

• An I7 2.6 Ghz Quad Core processor (this is the component showing it’s age these days).
• 12 GB of Triple Channel Ram 1066mghz
• Nvidia GeForce 260 with 1GB Vid Ram (This is also showing it’s age, but gaming isn’t the highest priority for me anymore, so it’s still handling everything I want to play… Namely WoW and Diablo 3 starting next week).
• Over 8 TB of Hard drives in Raid 1 (so over 4TB Usable).
• Over 300GB in SSD all running well over the 500MB/second line thanks to 2 very high end raid cards (Adaptec 6805 anyone?)

That said, it took Intel until just recently to upgrade the “Enthusiast” line of processors. But now that they have, I’m seriously tempted to replace my motherboard, processor, and ram (I’d probably still wait on the graphics card). What would that get me? Well…

• SIX cores with HT running at 3.2Ghz… Oh the video rendering time would be amazing…
• Probably either 16GB of Quad Channel Ram or 32GB… not really sure.
• Faster Bus and Memory speeds, with Native Sata6 and USB3 support (although my raid card does sata6 already, so I’m good there)
• More PCIe x16 Slots (not needed… yet… but if I upgrade my graphics cards they will be).

Really though, it’s the processor speed that I’m bringing into question. The sad part is, that a majority of the video rendering that I do is in a program called Camtasia. Camtasia hasn’t added support for more than 2 cores yet, which makes additional cores pointless for now. I don’t stand to gain much other than MGHZ, (which I could probably get now simply by over clocking). So that is probably my decision right there for now… Maybe Christmas will bring a JR bonus of a faster machine… Until then, I’ll just have to sit in awe of 6 core machines.

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Many people don’t realize that there computers (in most cases) only contain 2 or 3 moving parts.

• The fans
• The CDRom/Disk Drives
• The Hard Drive

Even if they do realize this, they fail to realize that everything that moves has friction, and eventually will fail with improper maintenance.

In my last 2 posts, I talked about my backup’s with Backblaze… but today I want to cover why I run a 4-disk Raid 10 (1+0) as opposed to a Raid 5.

There are 100′s of articles on this very topic. Most will speak to benefits of Raid 10 being that it’s generally faster than Raid 5, and more resilient to multiple disk failure. You’ll hear people say Raid 5 is better for cost, and if properly maintained, just as reliable as Raid 10. From a pure, replace-a-disk standpoint, I would tend to agree… Both are pretty evenly matched. In a pure storage situation, I would (and have) normally made the decision to go for a Raid 5 array.

But there are 2 things I’ve run into with Raid 5′s that have me saying “No” to them from now on.

The first is migration.

While it’s not a normal behavior to migrate an entire Raid to a new set of drives… It does occasionally happen, and in my case, it seems to happen about once every 3 years. Prior to this year, I was running a raid card that was only capable of having 4 drives (this is true of many onboard raid cards). When in a Raid 5 array, the only method to migrate the data was to find a data source larger than my raid (often tough at the time), copy it there, and then copy it back once the new raid was built. This slow process would work… but was often slow, and depending on how I did the disk copy, risked missing a file (or if it was an OS partition, losing my OS).

With Raid 1+0 you have another option… You can break the array, remove 2 drives, replace them with 2 larger ones, wait for the rebuild to finish, then break the other half of the array, replace with larger drives, resize your array and your parition, and wha-la… You can replace the drives with little to no downtime.  It even allows you to keep 2 drives in storage as backups while the array is being copied. Heck, you don’t even have to do both at once… you can play it safe and just do 1 at a time…

In theory, you could try something similar with Raid 5… replacing 1 drive at a time… but because of the failure rate, and speed at which the duplication happens… I would be very very concerned if something went wrong. I’m also not sure how well raid cards handle scaling up Raid 5′s when adding new devices (never personally tried).

The second reason I now avoid 5′s is actually the same reason I avoid Raid 0′s. Even with Backblaze, I often still want to try to recovery data from the drives themselves (not sure why, just seems to work out that way… then again, I haven’t had this problem since having Backblaze, so maybe I lie). In a raid 5 array, and with the cheaper controller cards put on the market, when rebuilding the 4th drive, if a sector goes bad anywhere in the process, you can often lose the entire array… Even if the system was running until then. Nicer cards can get around this, and keep building despite the issue, just marking that entire area bad. But the point is this: once the raid card thinks the raid is bad… your in big trouble… Even if you know 99.9% of the data is still there.

Thankfully, I have found (and have) software for recovering raid 0 type data from multiple drives. You simply tell it what drives to look at, and go from there… However, the software only works if you can match up the data properly. Raid 0 and Raid 10 make this fairly easy, as the data either matches or it doesn’t… In the case of Raid 5, the software I have will only work with the 3 drives that in theory don’t contain the checksum. While there may be software out there to recover data from Raid 5 arrays, I’m guessing it’s harder to find, and probably more expensive (if someone has built it).

In any case, my complete/near complete data loss count over the last 10 years has been this:

• Raid 0 – 3 Times (although 2 of these were both predicted, and expected, and protected with Backblaze)
• Raid 1 – 1 Time (And to this day, I don’t know how both drives failed as badly as they did)
• Raid 5 – 2 Times (Both times it happened during rebuild… which is why I don’t trust it, 1 was on cheap hardware, the other was on server raid hardware)
• Raid 10 – 0 Times (I’ve had 2 drives fail so far, but no complete failures, and have performed the migration I mentioned above twice as of this weekend).

I hope to try Raid 6 someday soon… but for the moment, I can’t really justify the on-paper performance hit. Would also love to try a Raid 50 or Raid 60 at some point too… Maybe when I build myself one of those Backblaze storage enclosures (Pods).

One final note for people using Google, and myself, should I ever spend an evening trying to solve this problem again… At the time of writing this, the Plextor M3 Series SSD drives do not appear to be compatible with the Adapetic 6805 raid card. The raid card is able to recognize 1 drive at a time… but not both plugged in at once. This is on Firmware 1.04 for the SSD’s, and 18668 on the 6805. I did manage to get it to recognize them briefly on cold boot a few times, but I couldn’t get it to be done reliably. I would also assume this would affect Crucial M4′s. That said, if your looking into buying SSD’s for the Adapetic 6805, I would recommend shopping from their compatibility list (found here).

My last post on what I do when my computer fails got some attention. I thought I would expound on the backup service I use (Backblaze) for those of you who asked.

I’ve been using Backblaze on most of my machines now for close to 3 years. When I first signed up with them, I did quite a bit of research into what company I wanted to go with. At the time, my choices were Mozy, Carbonite, and Backblaze. Since then, a few others have popped onto my radar, but for the most part, these are the 3 that I still trust, and have personal experience with.

Let me cover all 3.

Mozy is my least favorite of the 3. I haven’t run their latest home client, but I’ve been disappoint in their business level services for some time now. The backups are slow. The program goes non-responsive sometimes when I try to open the configuration. They only recently added an unlimited backup plan with an unlimited backup plan (and I believe my business clients are still paying per GB because they don’t have unlimited at the business level yet, but I could be wrong on that). One thing Mozy has going for it is that they are SAS70 compliant. For some of my business clients, this is a requirement, which then turns them into the cheapest SAS70 compliant online service I’ve found so far… For home users though, SAS70 compliance isn’t something I would be worried about… especially when we talk about Backblaze’s security.

Next up is Carbonite. They have an unlimited plan coming in at $59/year. However, I have 2 issues with Carbonite’s setup. 1) They don’t backup external drives unless you upgrade to their home premium account ($99/month). 2) Their large file size limit is 4GB. The backups also haven’t felt as fast to me. Carbonite has a few things going for it though as well. They have a server version, something Backblaze does not. They also have a slightly cooler interface for restore and backup… However, I have found this interface to be frustrating at times, especially the way it integrates with Windows Explorer. Carbonite is my current choice for servers.

Backblaze is my choice whenever possible. Backblaze has been constantly improving their feature set for the last 3 years. They support unlimited backups at a rate of ~$50/year (the cheapest I’ve found). Their backups are also extremely fast (depending on your bandwidth). The developers have taken the time to optimize it for speed in ways I haven’t seen done at Carbonite or Mozy. They batch small files for upload, and break large files up into pieces to make sure they transfer properly. They also don’t have a single file size limit… So backing up those 30GB virtual machine images actually works. They backup USB/eSATA drives without any issue (but not network drives), and their software is pretty good at knowing what NOT to backup (IE: don’t backup my OS). The only thing Backblaze doesn’t have going for it (in my mind) is that they don’t have a server version.

If you’re worried about security, Backblaze also features local private key encryption. Just a word of caution though, if you decide to use this feature, backup your private key like 8 times… Maybe even a hard copy, because you won’t be able to restore anything without the private key.

I have Backblaze installed on my personal machine, and it’s backing up 3TB of data and not complaining. My prices haven’t gone up. Most importantly: the data is there when I go looking for it online. I don’t feel like I’ve taken a performance hit to run it (although, I should be honest, for about a month and half, there were some times where I felt like my bandwidth was running a tad low… But hey, it had to upload a couple terabytes of data… you can always pause it while gaming).
If you are not backing up your machine, I strongly recommend getting Backblaze. If you are only backing up your machine locally, I again strongly recommend getting Backblaze.

If you still aren’t convinced that they are the coolest frood on the block, then get their free trial and see how you like it… In fact, even if you want to sign up with them, you have to get their free trial first (so do it either way). And if that still doesn’t convince you, read their blog. I especially like the one where they talk about building their own storage… Or maybe the one where they show exactly how it works behind the scenes.

Even if you don’t get Backblaze… PLEASE BACKUP YOUR FILES!

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I rely very heavily on my primary machine to do my job. In fact, it’s really the only thing I depend on. And as I have mentioned here before, the computer itself then depends on backblaze to keep all of it’s files safe.

But what does Justin do when he has to wait for a part to arrive to get it’s computer back to 100%? What systems are in place to help him out and keep his work flow going?

The simple answer is: I have a laptop (or 2) that I can do work from in the event that my desktop PC is completely offline. However, there are a few more complexities to this that really help make sure things keep running both when I switch to the laptop, as well as when I have to switch back.

First: My most important data files are always in sync using Google Drive (I used to use Dropbox, but made the switch for the extra storage). This includes files such as my encrypted password database, which allows me to get into just about everything else.

Second: My primary machine has a secondary OS on it in the event that something kills my main OS. This allows me to boot into it, and map my main storage array as a network drive on the laptop. Your probably asking, why don’t you just work from that drive then? The simple response: I don’t want to have to install all my software twice on my primary machine, just for situations like this. The more complicated response: I don’t want to be working directly on my machine in a degraded state if at all possible. Some might argue I still am… but I don’t even log in to the machine to access the storage shares. I used to do this with linux, just to be extra safe, but I found that dual booting for awhile was an issue (and I didn’t want to have to find a boot disk in the event of this type of failure).

By using my main storage array over the network, it insures that I both have access to my data, as well as, when the computer is fully restored, I have nothing I need to worry about migrating back. It’s all exactly where it should it be.

Third: Backblaze becomes my friend whenever something like this happens. (duh). There are always a few files on whatever drive failed that I have to pull back off. Most of the time it’s something like a license key for a piece of software.

Fourth: My external device setup is design to be easily moved from one machine to the next. In fact, I need only move 2 cables (my headphones and sound board) to my laptop to have full control. The rest are switched with a push of a button thanks to a USB KVM switch I use. Monitor, mouse, keyboard, external usb drives, iphone are all switched whenever I push the magic button. The only reason I have to redo the sound wiring is because normally my laptop is wired into my soundboard so I can hear it at the same time I hear my regular computer… if it was on the switch, this would create a nice little feedback loop whenever I switched to the laptop.

So needless to say, other than the slowdown caused by not-as-good hardware… I barely lose a beat.

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