Back-up paranoia

[weasley]

I have a desktop PC at home which has all my digital photo's on it (as well as all my music, but most of that is ripped off of CDs I still have). The PC has a 128GB SSD for the OS (Win10) and programs and a 1TB Seagate Barracuda HDD for storage. I also have an old 250GB external HDD that I sometimes do backups to.

I have got myself in a bit of a mess though. I have used the external HDD in various ways over the years - using backup programs, doing drag/drops, deleting and starting again etc, meaning that it probably has around 80% of my stuff on it, but in a mess of structure.

I have, in the past, had two HDD failures that have almost led to me losing a lot of data. I would like to set up a way of backing-up that is (1) easy to do and (2) robust.

My first thought was a RAID setup running in mirror mode. Then I found lots of people saying "repeat after me - RAID IS NOT FOR BACKUP!!". I understand why they say this, but I was hoping to run a RAID as a single external device, within which there would be two mirrored HDDs (so I would not mirror my PC to the RAID, I would do incremental backups to it, but within the RAID the two discs would mirror and therefore offer peace of mind).

Alternatively I could simply run a PC-attached USB HDD and backup by some kind of task scheduler.

I am also thinking about running <whatever> as NAS, mostly so that it is physically remote from the PC (at least in terms of being in a different room); the ability to then access this for sharing, DLNA etc is interesting but not a primary concern.

Further background: the files are personal, not commercial. I have Cat6 Ethernet around the house as well as a wifi router. PC has USB 2.0 and eSATA ports free. There is currently around 250GB of files, growing slowly. I do have various online storage options, although not used fully (Flickr, OneDrive, Google Drive etc).

TL:DR - is running a two-disc RAID NAS an appropriate backup strategy? If not, then what?
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Yamaha XJ600 | Yamaha YZF600R Thundercat | KTM 990 SMT | BMW F900XR TE

[stinkwheel]

Off. Site. Backup.

This is how my Brother does it with his business and personal data and it makes a whole load of sense.

Have two or more remote sites (he has home, business and his business partner).

All sites install a local NAS of whatever type and backup your files to it.

Set it up so your NAS synchs overnight via a VPN.

As such, they have backup copies of their personal and business files at three seperate locations. They've had to do a full crash recovery twice since they set up in business and it was apparently a piece of piss, just parachuted in new hardware, synched it and were up and running again.

So you'd need to find a friend or relative who's prepared to work together for your off site backup.

As you also mentioned. Has the advantage he can dial in from anywhere to access the data.
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“Rule one: Always stick around for one more drink. That's when things happen. That's when you find out everything you want to know.”
I did the 2010 Round Britain Rally on my 350 Bullet. 89 landmarks, 3 months, 9,500 miles.

[panrider_uk]

I would do it the other way round.

Have RAID in the pc and back that up to an external disc.


My actual setup is that no important files are stored on the pc, they are stored on a 2 bay mirrored NAS.

I have a second NAS for CCTV and the data NAS backs up to the CCTV NAS. It also backs up to an external USB drive.

The NAS boxes can back up to each other over the internet (so you can have them in different locations) and only backup those parts of files that have changed so is very quick.
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Current bikes: Honda ST1100 Pan European. Moto Guzzi V85 TT Travel

[Shinigami]

Personally, (mainly due to lack of funds)

I have

PC internal hdd (media/music/games)---synchronises over my lan to my media centre.

so thats 2 physical copies in the house.

I also have all of my music backed up on google play music
all my documents, photos etc on dropbox/google drive.

As long as there's not a fire/burglary and both pc's are taken i shouldn't technically loose much of anything (unless hdd in both machines dies the same day)

I'd like a way of storing my videos/movies etc but I'd need close to 2tb of storage which I can't afford physically at the mo or cloud would take about 3 years to upload...

presently use this for syncing the files up

https://super-flexible-file-synchronizer.en.softonic.com/
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Current: Honda City Fly CLR125 2003 Honda CB600F Hornet 2008 Yamaha FZ6 S2 + 1991 Kawasaki GPZ500
"Once you realize what a joke everything is, being the Comedian is the only thing that makes sense.

[Ste]

[CaNsA]

Any important stuff, like the "Cornish vs CaNsA" chat lawls, gets backed up to NobKitten.

HP Microserver N54L with 4 x 3TB drives in 2 x 3TB mirrors.

[t121anf]

Personally I have this setup.

HP Microserver N40L 4x 2TB HDD, Windows "raid" to create 2x 4TB,
D-Link Nas, 2x 2TB, raid or similar to 1x 4TB


the 1st 4TB of the N40L is the master, it is cloned to the 2nd 4TB of the N40L and also to the 4TB of the NAS, both nightly

Specific folders (photos mainly) are sent to the cloud (OneDrive is my current preference), again nightly.

Phones, backup photos direct to cloud, N40L pulls back any new photos from cloud, these are then synced across the other 2 4TBs.

If I remember, certain folders are synced to a 2TB external drive.



Ideally as stinkwheel, suggests at least 1 backup should be off site, until I can get my parents to invest in some hardware I'm a bit stick on that. I now have more cloud storage just never taken advantage of it.

I hope to add another microserver in the mix but never had chance (or need if honest, it's space i need)

I've lost harddrives before, I blame heat, I've yet to lose 1 harddrive from each of the pairings of drives, if that happened then I'd have problems, but so far so good. Besides the important things, photos are in MS's hands (hahahahaha)

[stinkwheel]

Regarding photo backup, I don't overwrite SD cards either.

I archive them when they're full.
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“Rule one: Always stick around for one more drink. That's when things happen. That's when you find out everything you want to know.”
I did the 2010 Round Britain Rally on my 350 Bullet. 89 landmarks, 3 months, 9,500 miles.

[linuxyeti]

Hi

Before deciding on your backup regime, decide you recovery needs, then base your backup procedure around that.

A couple of points, if you can, have a rotating external backup media, so that one can be kept offsite, in a desk at work, in your mums knicker draw, and one can be local, swap the round according to your recovery needs. No good having an offsite backup that's 3 Years old, when you're likely to need yo recover newer data.

Cloud backup is an option, however, that could turn out expensive, and there's the risk of what happens if the provider goes tits up, or you get locked out of your account?

There's plenty of backup software, my preference is for a rsync based backup, which on Linux is easy, on windows you'll have hunt around a bit.Of course if you versioning on your backup, then you'll need to investigate further, that of course will require more storage.

Other implications to consider are database backups, for example mysql database will really need to be dumped before backing up.

I'm sure others can chip in, but keeping your backup on your running machine, raided or not, is definitely a no no, the minimum should be 1 external drive, but that is the absolute minimum.

Cheers

Tony
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Beware what photos you upload, or link to on here, especially if you have family members on them

[Derivative]

As others have said, think about the scenarios you expect to restore from.

Physical HDD failure is the easiest one to deal with - though do consider stuff like power supply failure destroying all the drives connected to the same machine.

A security breach of some kind and anything on the network is vulnerable (said NAS RAID, offsite if it's unprotected or they can keylog the auth, etc).

A fire or burglary and that's anything in the house potentially gone.

I generally try to seperate out stuff that's actually important vs. the mounds of shit that accumulates in my collection. It's much easier to copy a few gig of documents to random USB drives you might have lying about - you can get tiny usb sticks (or just sd/micro sd cards) and leave them in your wallet.

[colink98]

any half sensible NAS will allow you to plug a USB drive into it and use that as a backup destination.

So your data gets stored on NAS and backed up to USB.
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PCX125 (stolen) - CBF600 (current)
Ride it like you stole it.
ride sensible and not like an idiot and you wont get 6 points in one week.

[Jayy]

NAS + RAID physically at the same location.

Super important stuff is backed up too but doubled in the cloud on 1TB of space.