Tidy backup solution, is this a good plan ? Input please :)

combat squirrel

combat squirrel

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Hi all, iv just got a drobo, so far, alls good, but im planning on doing the following, is it a good idea and will it be RELIABLE as a backup solution?:

1 drobo with 4x 500gb drives (what I have/can find)

Apple time machine 500gb (drive removed and placed in drobo, western digital green 1.5tb added)


So my plan is, the drobo should give me 1.4tb usable space, the time machine formatted is 1397gb, so pretty much the same (take ages fill it all), I have 3 questions:

1) Obviously if a drive fails in the drobo ill replace it, if the drobo fails however will it work if I buy another drobo and add the drives, will all my data be there ?

2) Ill time machine back up the drobo, so ill have drobos drive failure protection and also another copy of everything on the time machine, if drobo catastrophically failed, can I restore ANY time machine backup to any drive?, also can i restore any folders etc time machine will hold, like if I just wanted to recover my picture files off the time machine onto my mac?.

3) If for some reason Drobo failed, and time machine failed, I know drobo has a proprietary file system and cant be accessed without another drobo, but what about time machine ? for example say its electronics failed and the hardrive was fine, could i remove the harddrive, place it in a caddy and access its contents on my mac without it being in another time machine ?

The drobo btw is my 'main hard drive' it will get used day in day out (holds all my pics, itunes, vids etc), as I have a macbook pro with a SSD drive in it, main use is lightroom etc.

Thanks
 
1) As long as the drobo failing doesn't kill the drives too...
2) Can you Time Machine network/external drives? (I don't know as have never tried). You can get any folder out of a TM back up though and drag it to any other location on your Mac, I assume this would include network drives.
3) Assuming you mean Time Capsule here, mine is formatted as HSF+, so readable by any Mac, although you would need it to be 10.5+ to access the Time Machine data.

The last bit is the main concern, as it is only really giving you one point of back up, ie Time Machine, to be a really safe back up you need at least 2 copies in addition to your working copies, with one in a different location.
 
Good questions - I've got a similar setup except with a Synology Cubestation.
Here are some observations I'd like to throw into the mix.

RAID 5 is quite slow, you would get much better performance using the Time Machine as your main drive and backing up to the Drobo.

Unorderly shutdown - if the disk is half way through a write when the power is removed then corruption could occur. This applies to both disks. I went for a small UPS which waits five minutes then shuts down my Cubestation in an orderly fashion when power is lost. I'm planning for this to feed the desktop too, but haven't done it yet. The laptop can look after itself.

Power surges - my village sits on top of 800ft of limestone and all our cables are above ground. Every year someone in the village loses a lot of kit, a house near me had their ADSL filter melted off the wall earlier this year. WiFi is a superb solution to this as most of the bad spikes seem to come via the phone line. I don't care if the wireless router gets fried. The UPS switches to battery as soon as a surge occurs but I still prefer unplugging when a thunderstorm rolls up the hill.

Single site - if you have a fire you lose everything.... This is tricky and I'm still thinking about it. Two good options are first to periodically backup critical data to an external drive and leave it with the neighbours. By critical I mean my best images, address book, KeePass, etc - this ought to be small enough to be manageable in an overnight copy. Another option is to use a mains network to access a cheap NAS located in a separate building and set up an automated backup to keep the contents up to date.

I look forward to seeing what responses you get.
Thanks in advance - Duncan

Edit: Not sure what a time machine is - I've kinda assumed its an external drive of some kind with software to back files up onto it....
 
im a firm believer that a backup consists of 2 or more physical devices and more than one physical location. and raid (or drobos version of it) is 1 physical device in my book.

what happens if the drobo fails and nukes all the attached data? or the house burns down?
 
Craikeybaby said:
1)
2) Can you Time Machine network/external drives? (I don't know as have never tried). You can get any folder out of a TM back up though and drag it to any other location on your Mac, I assume this would include network drives.
Click to expand...


Yeah you can back up any drives attached to the mac :) my drobo is attached via firewire so no network involved.


Some great responses here and excellent food for thought, as for off site back up I was thinking perhaps Mozy or another online back up service ? :)
 
neil_g said:
usb drive and store it at work?
Click to expand...

It would take a 2TB hard drive and the only place I could put it would be in my locker at work ;) , I guess this is option 3 for file backup, good plan really, do hard drives also like being stored at -30 ? :LOL:

(work in a laboratory, lol)

So hows this sound then

1) All the drobo/time machine stuff as said above

2) Mozy to upload my stuff there

3) off sight at my parents house (this ill do later when I can afford a 2TB drive !)
 
Plan for the worst and hope for the best, is a good axiom with data storage.

If you can't afford a 2Tb drive at th moment you could always back up on to CD/DVD as a temporary measure. I use this method as part of my backup routine. Images on Drive, Backup drive ,Off site drive, DVD.

OK some people say that DVD's aren't suitable for long term archiving, which is true, but choose a good make ( I use Verbatim) and in the medium term they should be OK.

It's really just belt and braces ( well several braces, if you see what I mean)
 
Re: online storage. I use Carbonite but it doesn't back up external hard drives. So Moby would be a better choice, I think.

The big problem would be you initial back-up. Mine took weeks about 2 years ago, so what with many more and bigger files since then, it could take months if I moved over to Mozy.

You'd face the same problem but if you could live with that, its seems a good solution to me.
 
I also use Mozy for offsite back up, but only about 80GB as I only keep images on my working harddrive for 6 months unless they have been sold or otherwise used.
 
Yeah using mozy now, got nearly 400gb to upload :s, and that's just what I have to save, lol, yeah it allows any drives attached to the mac :) did 0.5% overnight so I guess 166days at that rate, haha, as long as it eventually gets there that's all that matters, the 2 otherback up solutions should cover it until then, certainly hope it really is unlimited *** there getting over 2tb eventually ! Haha
 
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