Reply to: How important/useful is dual-bay (RAID1 mirror) in a home NAS, with cloud backup?

[NotAllThere]

why 4 TB?. I am planing on getting a 2TB NAS with 2x8TB drives.



I currently have an 11 yr old 4bay Synology NAS. Started out with 4x4TB drives. To cut a long story short, It is now limping with just 1 drive in the bay and 2 X 4TB 2.5" portable drives attached for weekly/daily backups. I decided that RAID really was not for me as long as I had backups


So I pretty much thought I am well protected .... until a colleague's house got broken into and that got me thinking of Theft, Fire and Flood since all my backups are in the house.


I have heard in this tread about S3 Glacier and Blackblaze online backup. which is best of for 3.5TB worth of data



I am sticking with 2bay NAS this time around so Synology or Qnap for NAS?

8TB drives aren't as reliable as 4TB. I use Synology. My son uses Qnap. Synology is easier but less flexible to use.

[css_jay99]

It's important to make sure that your individual HDD are from different batches, even different manufacturers. 4TB is the maximum size you should use.

why 4 TB?. I am planing on getting a 2TB NAS with 2x8TB drives.



I currently have an 11 yr old 4bay Synology NAS. Started out with 4x4TB drives. To cut a long story short, It is now limping with just 1 drive in the bay and 2 X 4TB 2.5" portable drives attached for weekly/daily backups. I decided that RAID really was not for me as long as I had backups


So I pretty much thought I am well protected .... until a colleague's house got broken into and that got me thinking of Theft, Fire and Flood since all my backups are in the house.


I have heard in this tread about S3 Glacier and Blackblaze online backup. which is best of for 3.5TB worth of data



I am sticking with 2bay NAS this time around so Synology or Qnap for NAS?

[NotAllThere]

How DO people here handle backup?

I backup to NAS, and backup the NAS every now and then to S3 Glacier.

[Hobosapien]

When I scanned my parents old photos of the family I gave various satellite family members a copy by way of a crimbo pressie of a digital photo frame using a flash card of the photos. Others I gave a playable DVD version.

Distributed backup and crimbo pressies sorted at the same time.

[d000hg]

Photos are an interesting one. They're typically files you don't actually need to access or have locally, you just want to be damn sure they are backed up. If you lose your local copy it's unlikely to matter that it takes some time to get them back. Individual photos and most documents are so small that in fact, accessing them from Cloud on-demand as needed is barely a problem for productivity.

[amanwhoisquiet]

How DO people here handle backup?

I have a old, unsupported 2 bay enclosure in the garage that i use to back up photos, music and other guff. The disks are raid 1. I also have a big USB disk plugged into that and it does a scheduled backup from the enclosure.

Other than that I depend on google. I pay £1.50 a month for 100GB of extra storage on drive or whatvever they've rebranded it as. Also use an awfully buggy client on desktop machines that copies selected local folders up to google - and drops photos into the unlimited photo store you get with google (albeit compressed a bit). This doesn't do recovery though really.

I can recover music and other stuff, but photos are the big one I'd be upset about.. and current work I'm in the middle of. I once dropped a portable harddisk with a lot of photos on a tiled floor and over half of them were lost. I'm not letting that happen again - buy a case for those big usb hdds!

[NotAllThere]

No, I'm saying RAID5 is a BCP option, allowing you to continue working following a physical failure at a reduced capacity. It is not a DR-preventing one. RAID5 volumes in a RAID0,1 configuration is the only disaster tolerant solution.

RAID 5 is VERY out of vogue nowadays - it's not particularly well regarded any more when better options such as 1+0 and 6 exist. A lot of people have found to their detrement that the R5 rebuild process is pretty harsh on the other disks and if a second fails before the rebuild you're up the creek.

Saw it loads back in my 2nd line days at an MSP - standard server load out was R5, so we'd toddle out, replace a disk and set off the rebuild which could take hours and hours. It wasn't unusual to then receive the "servers gone" call the next day

Fair enough. And I checked by configuration when I got back, and it is RAID 6.

[d000hg]

I do remember talking to a rep about this at a trade event quite a few years ago. I expressed amazement you could need better than RAID 5 (I think it was) but they pointed out the number of disks floating around in a data-centre, something with a very low statistical probability becomes pretty much a certainty at that scale.

[sal]

Go for the 1 bay model, then hook a cheap USB HDD and use the build-in Synology backup.

Source please.

You seem to be saying that the whole idea of RAID 5 is wrong.

RAID 5 is obsolete in Enterprise environments, still viable for SOHO as long as you are aware of the risks.

It's largely to do with massive increase ins size of individual disks and general decline in quality of individual drives mainly attributed to wide spread of cheap SATA disks in Enterprise environments.

The problem stems from the fact that while RAID 5 is rebuilding you are vulnerable to complete data loss. The process of rebuilding is very intensive and while it was fine 5-10 years ago with sub-TB drives nowadays with large 4TB+ drives can take more than 24h. I have seen it fail during rebuild once and another time it was extremely close - hours after the rebuilt a second drive of the same array failed. Not something you want to see in Production system.

The answer is usually RAID6, the added cost of 1 extra disk for parity is negligible especially in 10-12 disk arrays

RAID 10/1+0 etc. is usually for performance or 2 disk redundancy in 4 disk arrays, where RAID6 is pointless. At scale it becomes way to expensive.

[pscont]

And in the post apocalyptic waste ground which earth will become what do you think your download speeds will be?

who cares?

And remember children: the only successful backup is the restored back up.

[original PM]

Cloud.

And in the post apocalyptic waste ground which earth will become what do you think your download speeds will be?

[Hobosapien]

To protect personal data such as photos try to distribute the backups across various media that can be easily replaced periodically to keep it fresh from natural deterioration.

Also ensure at least one method is not sensitive to magnetism in case of EMP or solar storm.

So have copies across hard drives and solid state (SSD or flash memory sticks), on burned media (CD/DVD) and maybe even print out all those zeroes and ones if you're pessimistic about current tech resilience.

I noticed recently some DVD burners offer 'M-Disc' compatibility which aims to preserve discs for a thousand years. I guess by then the format will be as alien as coming across a Voyager disc in deep space.

Personally I let inevitable advances in tech take care of backup refreshes by way of moving to newer larger hard drives (next stop likely terabyte SSDs to replace my mechanical HDDs) or other sources so nothing is left to rot for more than a few years in one place.

[pscont]

So here is a question

I have loads of photo's on a hard drive

which I have backed up to another hard drive and also burned a copy onto CD (which is a bit old school)

but ultimately - those backups will start to fail

and so at some point your data will, despite your best efforts; be lost.

What options do we have to stop them being lost forever?

Cloud.

[pscont]

How DO people here handle backup?

Real important data is backed up to 3 different clouds (500 MB in size). The folder structure is mirrored to the cloud via webdav and each individual file is encrypted before upload. Every change in a file results in new version of it uploaded to the cloud. The back up soft runs on linux and it is written by me.

Last 15 years of pictures and videos (~120 GB) are stored to yet another loud (500 gb purchased for £70 one off) in the same way, mirrored FS, encrypted.

Typical broad band speed on fiber in UK is 80 Mb down and 20 Mb up (even more in my other country - 200d, 50up), so not an issue when you can retrieve individual files from the backup.

[malvolio]

That's a good question. I had a major tidy up at one client, who had religiously hung on to a pile of backup media going back to the company's formation. After much digging I found one company in the UK (in Cardiff, actually) that still had the tech needed to do anything with it, assuming the media hadn't physically deteriorated anyway.

Since there is a total tech refresh roughly every 10 years, the only safe way to keep stuff "forever" is by recycling it back in to your current platform every few years and re-archiving it. I fear most of us won't actually bother. The only other way is hard copy, sadly, and that's not always feasible.

That said, the cloud should allow that rolling refresh to happen since it is run on "someone else's computers" which should be refreshed regularly. But I would read the contract very carefully to see how that happens in reality. More than a few providers don't actually do backups, but rely on multiply redundant server and storage farms; OK for short term failures, absolutely useless for long term archiving.