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

[d000hg]

How DO people here handle backup? I worked in a startup company where there backup was "take a copy of the server drives home at night". And there is IMO something to be said for a physical backup you keep in your car/somewhere away from the house, even if you only do it once per week.

I can't see a way to get away from cloud for personal backups, but all these NAS have USB3. Are they setup so you can plug in an external disk and have it mirrored (not RAID) in case you want to take it with you when you travel (to access your music/video/work)?

[BackupBoy]

How is Backblaze preferable to anything else one might use (OneDrive, Google, DropBox, etc)? It looks great from their blurb but what is the USP or advantage?

One issue I have is speed of these cloud providers... I rarely get download/upload speeds close to what my ISP supports which suggests a bottleneck somewhere. If you have to rebuild from backup you want to get 20Mbps not 2

Backblaze B2 connects directly from the NAS to their cloud, so you bypass the limitation of 1) having to keep a directly attached (eg USB) drive connected and 2) they don’t support SMB volumes (unless over the world of potential hurt that’s iSCSI) mounted to a PC that’s running the client.


You can get them to send you a drive with the data on, which could well be faster than downloading TB's of data.

Also, you rebuild primarily from local storage. Rebuilding from cloud is absolutely the last resort.

[northernladuk]

I think you've missed the point. It would be backed up - all my important files already are (accounts, code, etc). You'd be a fool to trust RAID as your backup solution in case your house catches fire or a power surge takes it out.

The question is specifically about removing the headache of having to USE the backup. As I see it, with RAID you are almost certainly never going to need your backup barring fire/theft/lightning but without it, there's an appreciable chance you will.

If it is storing files I don't need day-in-day-out then is having to re-sync a new drive from my cloud backup (that could take a few days) a problem basically? Is RAID worthwhile to protect my MP3 collection?

I see what you are saying so maybe I did word it incorrectly but the message that when the worst does happen it tends to be a lot worse than you thought it would is still true. A bit of time and a few 19s of pounds to avoid it is more than worth it even if the worst risk is a bit of gnashing of teeth and time spent recovering. Cutting corners at initial setup is false economy.

[d000hg]

You can get them to send you a drive with the data on, which could well be faster than downloading TB's of data.

Yeah I find it amazing that it's still faster to post someone large amounts of data sometimes. Especially if it involves uploading it, and you are on typical Fibre speeds. I can definitely see that as a plus.

I didn't understand your other point, surely most NAS drives can connect directly to most mainstream cloudy providers in the same way?

[Cid]

The synology units have a really nice backup application built in.
all you need is an external USB drive.

[BackupBoy]

Yeah I find it amazing that it's still faster to post someone large amounts of data sometimes. Especially if it involves uploading it, and you are on typical Fibre speeds. I can definitely see that as a plus.

I didn't understand your other point, surely most NAS drives can connect directly to most mainstream cloudy providers in the same way?

It depends on what the NAS manufacturer supports on any particular array. My older Netgear units don’t support anything other than Netgear’s cloud, for example. I have them synced together between my home office and a friend who (conveniently) has his own datacentre.

Regardless of all this, three copies of your data usually all that’s needed. Source, local protected and offsite. How you achieve that depends on how important your data is and how much you want to spend.

[Hobosapien]

How DO people here handle backup? I worked in a startup company where there backup was "take a copy of the server drives home at night". And there is IMO something to be said for a physical backup you keep in your car/somewhere away from the house, even if you only do it once per week.

I can't see a way to get away from cloud for personal backups, but all these NAS have USB3. Are they setup so you can plug in an external disk and have it mirrored (not RAID) in case you want to take it with you when you travel (to access your music/video/work)?

I don't rely on cloud backups but once the pain of the initial bulk upload is complete the regular syncing should be easy with the faster fibre upload speeds now available with 'Fibre to the cabinet' (or premises if you're lucky/extravagant).

Instead I have a backup strategy that keeps the more important and frequently used files on a primary 'always available' NAS that is synced to a second line 'usually off' NAS that also holds cold storage of older or less frequently used files. The second line NAS is then mirrored with an identical one stored off site and periodically brought on site to do the mirroring. Otherwise kept at a relatives so geographically separated against fire/flood/theft.

The above allows me not to bother with RAID instead use 'just a bunch of disks' to get more storage capacity and therefore spent less on the cheaper NAS solutions that don't have all the bells and whistles.

The cost of the second line NAS hardware can be reduced further by using a USB 3.0 SATA docking station to sync the data from the primary NAS onto a bunch of disks, as the second line NASes are only ever on to do the syncing.

None of the above contains any sensitive/personal docs or info, I use an encrypted usb drive for that, periodically mirrored to a second one stored off site.

Works for me.

[original PM]

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?

[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.

[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.