what do you think of this as a backup strategy

domart

domart

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so, i've been looking to get a bit more serious with my storage backups recently as I have a jumble of hard drives so it's just a bit of a mess

I picked up a 20tb wd dual drive usb on black friday, set up in raid 1, I know raid isnt a backup...
shifting around terabytes of data is also really slow, and I have a bunch of hard drives i'd like to just centralise into one place, so I thought about a 5 bay enclosure and buying disks, but in the end I bought another one of the wd 20tb's, as the cost wasnt much more than 2 10tb disks- whether I use the case or just sell it and use the disks is still up for discussion

so now i'm thinking set it up as raid 0 for 20tb of really fast storage, and have that set up for hourly backups to the other unit, so, essentially making a 40tb (20tb usable) raid 10 set up with fast primary storage, and a full backup with time offset, so that if a file corrupts i'm not nuking my backup a la raid 1, I would have versioning and deleted file protection for as long as I have space on the backup disk, and the backup and main disks are separated so a fault with the hardware wouldnt wipe out both the primary and the backup- I also will probably have a third offsite backup with backblaze, as it's cheap enough, and my internet fast enough, that it's almost a no brainer

I can use my old 8tb external disks as deep storage archive drives, backed up as a pair and put one off site, maybe put them in the cloud in due course, and sell off any drives I dont need like the smaller 5tb's etc
 
once everything is centralised, I think it would be easier to do a cloud backup for one big drive rather than multiple small drives- but yes 100% I will be doing cloud backups, thank you amazing internet speeds!
 
Cloud backups are great until you can't get online for whatever reason
 
cssjim said:
Cloud backups are great until you can't get online for whatever reason
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i'm not saying it would be my main backup, just my offsite backup, this is the backup I hope I never have to touch, so, paying £3 a month seems like a no brainer vs leaving a stack of hard drives in my parents loft or something


fundamentally the question is, if the wd 20tb units are 2x10tb disks, should I run raid 0 and have that back up to the other device, or is backing up raid 0 a bad idea and I should just run them as jbod, with device one having 2 10tb disks individually addressable, and both backed up to the other wd unit, could do that with a 4/5 bay raid enclosure but I dont fancy having my data and the backup on the same device in case idk, I dropped it and lost everything
 
I suggest doing a few tests in both RAID configurations to see if they can saturate a 1GBps network link. If RAID1 can do it then stick with it for the added resilience. In Windows, Task Manager's Performance tab is very useful. Remember to use large files (i.e multi-gigabyte) for testing as the transfer rate drops dramatically with small files. Also remember that the PC drive you're copying to/from will have an effect so anything less than an SSD makes it the limiting factor.
 
If this is for onsite backup only do you need a fast speed? It took me hours to write the data to my backups the first time but now they only add files since the last backup or remove files I’ve deleted since the last back up- this only takes a few minutes as there isn’t usually that much data to transfer (I have set up the safety net function on my 3TB onsite backup to catch files I’ve accidentally deleted-I think I’ve set to to store them for 90 days before deleting.

Also how much space do you need? 20TB would be a lot of space to fill up. Are all of your main origin drives on your computer and data backed up from there rather than copied from the main to first backup, first backup to second backup.

A couple of years ago I sorted out my backup, it’s;

Onsite backup- 1x 3TB RAID 1 (2x 3TB drives)
Offsite backups- 2x 2TB portable drives (now using a G Tech slot in enclosure for ease)

This gives me two on-site backups and one backup always off-site (one is always off site as I take the onsite backup to the off site backup and swap away from home).

I use software to do the backups for me using carbon copy cloner. Im useless at doing them myself and always forgot to do them. It runs the backup, sends me emails when they are done and even reminds me when the offsite backup has been done in a while.

I thought about future proofing this storage when I bought it. Theoretically I could reformat the on-site drive to RAID0 for 6TB and add more portable drives (hopefully larger drives will be possible and more cost effective in the future) but the way I see it is that it’s taken me nearly 7 years to get to 1TB so I should have many more years before I need to make that decision. If my internet was faster I would be using cloud for my offsite storage. Still waiting for a faster network to be added to my village.

I wrote about my backup system a while ago for my website (I think it needs updating slightly as it’s changed a little since I wrote this):

https://spark.adobe.com/page/Os6kX8G8QcZoA/
 
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just set them both to RAID1 and have done with it, having 1 and 0 won't in my opinion gain you much if any performance benefit.

and for what it's worth you wont have a RAID10 set up doing that either.

I'd echo the comment about off site backup however, all this storage is pointless if your house burns to the ground.
 
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