Just wondering what most people with NAS setups do in this regard. On the topic of the 3-2-1 rule (3 copies of data, on 2 different types of media, 1 off-site):

  1. Do you have a second full copy of your data on site, or do you consider RAID with redundancy good enough to satisfy the ‘2’ part of the rule?
  2. Do you back up everything to a cloud service for the ‘3’ part of the rule, and if so who do you use (and why)?

I’m just curious in general what NAS users are doing here, as clearly those with large storage pools (I’m talking tens of TB and up) are going to pay through the nose to have second and third copies.

Cheers :)

  • BadWithUserNames456@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I have about 45 tb worth of data, mainly movies, tv shows, and roms. I have an unraid server that I use for daily use. The Unraid server has a single parity disk in the event of disk failure. For redundancy I also use external hard drives for cold local storage, they get updated about once a month. Lastly I have a friend who lives in another town whom I have all my data backed up with, and I backup his data as well. We backup each other’s data around twice a year. Lastly I have about 20 gigs of data which I really don’t want to lose, I have this data backed up to the cloud as well.

    With that being said to me it is just a matter of how important you think the data is, and what you feel comfortable spending to make sure you keep it. For me I’ve been data hoarding for about the last 10 years, so to me this is 10 years worth of work, and I’d rather not lose it.

    To answer your first question about raid, I don’t consider it enough to satisfy the part 2 rule. For my server I bought all my hard drives at the same time. That means if they were a bad batch of hard drives they might all fail one after another. Even if I got a good batch, they are all getting used at about the same rate, so they will likely age at about the same rate. If one of the hard drives dies, the others are likely not far behind, and the stress of rebuilding the array might kill off the rest.

    As to your second question, I try to limit how much I have stored on the cloud. For me it makes much more sense, if you want to have a third copy of your data, to buy an external hard drive and give it to a friend to hold onto.

  • snatch1e@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I have a backup NAS as my primary backup copy and uploading the most important data to the Backblaze. This simple setup works perfectly for me.

  • H2CO3HCO3@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    u/symean, a RAID (or NAS for that matter) system is NOT a backup solution and should never be considered as one.

    With regard to your backup solution, you should then look into implementing a 3-2-1 backup model. One of the many example Videos for BackUps:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB4kwfY2w7A

    Having that said, what your BackUp model should be, ie. Full, Differencial, Incremantal, etc, will depend on your budget, storage capacity and end goals.

    With regards to Backups best practices, see (for example) the following video (of the many, many other ones that find in youtube as well):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0KZ5iXTkzg

    Best Regards