F'ing NAS took a dump

[Ticktock]

My photos are important to me and my family. Their value to anyone else is zero....

Cool. Can I have some copies please?

[doodab]

And I don't understand why people put so much trust in Google.

Or any other Yank company come to that.

I can understand the convenience side of things like google docs and dropbox but not so much for backups, especially if there is a serious volume of data involved. When a years worth of storage for several TB costs roughly the same as a mechanical hard disk you may as well do it the old fashioned way and store the disk offsite.

[CloudWalker]

Use https://mega.co.nz/
It gives you 50gb for FREE! great for backing up those private photos

[OwlHoot]

Very frustrating.

Had one hard drive start playing up, (out of 4), was in the process of sorting a return out to the supplier, then another drive decided to disappear.

Everything gone!!!

I have backups of my accounts, photos and other irreplaceable stuff but my video collection has gone.

Well P155£D off!!!!!!!

Oh that must be very frustrating - I feel your pain!

Have you considered a disk recovery service? They might be able to retrieve some or all the data.

I had something similar with one disk in my NAS, but luckily replaced it before any others went for a burton.

I back up my NAS onto 1 Tbyte Transcend USB 3 disk drives, which are as cheap as chips and are powered via the USB cable alone so no awkward separate power cables. But I think for belt-and-braces, and faster, backup it would be good to also buy a couple of Seagate 6 tbyte disks.

[Platypus]

Seagate 6 tbyte disks.

Good find. I use Seagate 3GB consumer drives. They're not reliable, but those beauties look very good - designed for 24x7 usage

[doodab]

It is worth thinking about which drives you put in these things.

The various "energy saving" / "green" consumer drives spin more slowly and are designed to spin down at the drop of a hat to save power. While that's fine for a desktop or HTPC, in an environment where they are a bit busier they are constantly spinning up and down which puts a lot more wear and tear on them, so they tend to fail prematurely. They are best avoided IMO.

The various NAS optimised & enterprise ones generally spin at 7.2K, and supposedly have different firmware that avoids the constant spinning up and down. They are also supposed to be a bit more vibration resistant + better in terms of how they handle retries internally before reporting an error to the OS which can count for something in a multi drive setup. Whether it's worth paying 2-3x as much for "enterprise" drives over standard desktop drives is debatable though, in a multi drive setup it makes more sense to buy a couple extra of the cheaper drives to keep as spares IMPO.

I've got a few of the Hitachi Deskstar NAS 3TB which seem to be a reasonably priced halfway house. I think the WD Reds are a similar idea but I steered clear of those when I saw the phrase "intellipower" in place of a spindle speed.

[chef]

So, after reading this thread I decided cloud backup storage wouldn't be a bad idea seeings as all my backups right now are onsite and so if the worst came to the worst and the house burnt down I'd be screwed.

So Crashplan Family licence purchased, installed on macbook and NAS, set it running on the NAS first, 1.4Tb data... 5.7 months remaining until first backup is done..

[robpow]

Also remember that backups are useless unless you regularly test the restores.

Nothing worse than having a backup plan only to find you three years down the line that you can't get anything out of it.

Test restoring from your backups regularly, both random files and entire volumes.

If you have Macs you can set up two Time Capsules and it will automatically round robin the backups between them. And then rsync one off them off-site.

Matt

[darrylmg]

So, after reading this thread I decided cloud backup storage wouldn't be a bad idea seeings as all my backups right now are onsite and so if the worst came to the worst and the house burnt down I'd be screwed.

So Crashplan Family licence purchased, installed on macbook and NAS, set it running on the NAS first, 1.4Tb data... 5.7 months remaining until first backup is done..

Did I understand that right?
It will take 5.7 months to complete the backup.
Or, did you mean the backup will be started in 5.7 months time?

[chef]

5.7 months to complete

I split up the backup into Photos/important docs and then other, the first took 3 days, now it's onto the other stuff with 5.5 months left to go