Raid backup

bernard0368

Hi
has anyone any advice tips etc on installing a back up system.
I was thinking of a Raid but my knowledge is very limited on this.

Thanks

Alanstrainor

I would say the best option would be a NAS device which supports RAID 1. RAID 1 just means that the device has two equal sized discs, 1 of which is a copy of the other. So in the event of a drive failure, the other takes over. It doesn't matter which fails, they both store exactly the same information.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/TerraMaster-D2-310-External-Enclosure-Diskless/dp/B01CS4TNQC/ref=pd_sbs_147_5/259-5470645-6827058

But it depends on what you are using this for really. Will you be accessing the files stored here all the time? Or is it a more long term storage solution? Really when I recommend backup solutions to people it's always a two tier backup system. A local backup, in this case the NAS device. And a cloud backup, which usually means an online service to backup all your data. The reason being that even if the NAS is RAID1, that doesn't leave you completely safe. House burning down, enclosure falling off the table and destroying both discs

bernard0368

Thank Alanstrainor, i was looking at my set up last night and noticed I have over 2Tb of images saved on internal HDDs, which are separate from the operating system. just feel they are vulnerable. So best to get them backed up. It would be nice to access them of other devices so that lead me towards a Nas.

magicbastarder

or you could go with a manual offsite option, get an external disk, backup onto it and leave it on another site.
like i do with leaving a disk in my parent's house, i take it home and sync it every few months usually.

bernard0368

Thanks Magicbastarder, I do have an external disk, never thought of leaving it off site though.

magicbastarder

it's the offsite bit which is most important for me - i have two disks in my computer, both with my photos on them; that covers me in case of hardware failure of a disk.
but i have the external disk offsite in case of fire or theft, or other such incident which might render the above moot.

ED E

RAID is not backup. RAID is redundancy.


Also three is two, two is one, one is none.

Heebie

O have a custom-built Linux PC using ZFS across 6 2 TB disks with "raidz2" as the array type.
This gives me 8TB usable space, and it takes the loss of three disks at once for data loss to occur.
(This is still raid and not backup)
For the stuff I deem really important, I also have portable hard disks that I can copy the data to, and keep off-site, and some other stuff gets backed up (in an encrypted format) to both Google drive and mega.co.nz on free accounts.
So there are as many as four copies in four locations of the most important stuff.
If I had the bandwidth and money, I'd have full backups of the ZFS array somewhere else via incremental snapshotting.