Computer options for data redundancy

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Matthew F

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I was wanting to get some opinions from the people on here about backing up photos. Whilst I am quite new to photography, this issue also exists with other data have on my computer.

At present my main desktop has 3 drives all Sata:
#1 232 GB (16gb free atm) which OS boots from and holds program data, frequently used documents etc.
#2 1TB Drive (19.3 GB free) which holds media, some old videos and rips of my dvd and music collection
#3 1TB Drive (160 GB free) which holds backups of server directories, usage stats, historical changes etc.

I have been putting new photos on #2, with both unprocessed and processed copies and then uploading the better ones to Flickr. The impersonal media doesn't need to be backed up, as if the drive goes down I can always hunt round the corners of the house finding the discs to rip again, but if I am creating lots of new photos and media, what do you think is the best option for me to expand storage capacity?

I can obviously Sync (SyncToy is the one I have been fiddling with) between drives to backup essential stuff but I don't have that much free capacity so the way I see it I could either buy a 1TB h/d or two and continue with my current method of only backing up essential stuff, switch to a RAID configuration, not sure which one but have a few options with my controller. External harddrives are another option, as could be NAS.

If you had 2TB of data you wanted backed up with possibility of scaling it to 3TB and upwards and already had 2 x 1TB drives and 232gb, what setup what you create and what additional drives would you buy?

Interested on hearing peoples thoughts on this,

Cheers,
Matthew
 
I've got a 160GB 2.5" external HDD hooked up to my iMac that has my photos on. That is also backed up onto a 500GB Seagate firewire drive that is constantly plugged into my iMac.

If I were you, I'd consider a NAS box. Link it up to your wireless system and everything will be backed up and ready constantly. :D
 
Forget about RAID for backup. A RAID array is fine as a place to store data but it is not much more protection than a single drive would be if the controller fails and makes them all unreadable.

I currently have a PC on the network as my main backup. it has 2 x 2Tb drives in it. One shared, one not. The unshared drive contains a mirror of the shared one but does not propagate deletions. The PC is only turned on for backup so I have been considering a server or NAS that could sleep and only wake when needed. I'm wary of NAS units having had 2 fail on me and the server I was looking at doesn't do sleep....so for now I prefer my current solution.
 
RAID is not a backup and should never be used as a single point of storage.

key is multiple copies of your data (treat a RAID box as 1) and rotate one copy off site ideally. what method of storage is up to you, be it hard drives, blu-ray. hard drives are easilest and fastest for most.

for example my current config:

raid 5 array (main storage)
raid 0 array (local backup)
USB Hard Drives and Blu-Ray (off site backup)
 
My strategy is the following:

  • Order your data into three sets of stuff:
    • MUST backup as no ability to recreate - e.g. photos, documents, user files
    • HIGH priority as it would be a pain to re-rip - e.g. CDs (I have hundreds!)
    • LOW priority as whilst it might be a pain to recreate, the cost of backing up is relatively high - e.g. DVD and BluRay rips
  • Budget for multiple backups of MUST, two copies of HIGH and possibly use some form of data redundancy (e.g. RAID5) to guard against losing LOW
  • Have backups in separate enclosures (e.g. 2 PCs or 1 PC & 1 NAS...)
  • Have backups offsite if possible.
  • Make an "image" of your system disk (with something like "drive snapshot") so if that fails you can just restore it and not have to reinstall everything.

So, for me, I have a datastore that holds all my media. This runs PC-BSD and has a boot drive, a RAIDZ (RAID5 like) array of 4 x 2TB disks with an additional 1 hot swappable for media and 2 x 1TB drives mirrored as a backup (yes, that's 8 disks in total!). This provides a 6TB usable media share and a 1 TB backup drive. I also have another PC with 2 x 1TB drives mirrored as a secondary backup device.

My backup strategy is:
  • Don't backup the media store - it is covered by data redundancy.
  • Backup all "user" files to the backup on the main mediastore at 20 minute intervals
  • Sync the mediastore backup -> the other PC overnight (this means I have 3 copies of everything)
  • Sync my music files (stored on the big media disk) to the other PC. These are my HIGH files
  • On a weekly basis snapshot the system disk so I can recreate my system if necessary

Does that help in any way?
 
Last edited:
arad85,

That is very helpful and it definately makes sense to assess the priorites of data then determining what backups are required of them. Should certainly mean I can be more efficent with my purchasing of drives.

I shall rule raid out for now then, and I may have some bits kicking about which allow me to build a linux NAS box, though I think HP had a cashback deal on their Microservers recently which brought them down in price abit so shall have a look their.

What software are most people running on their NAS's? FreeNAS, Linux, Windows Server or are they prebought NAS boxes such as those from WD?

Cheers,
Matthew
 
Also as I keep saying don't forget Hotmail's SkyDrive for backing up.

You currently get 25Gb of storage FREE with every Hotmail account.

May not seem like a great deal but for saving documents etc it is great.

.
 
Matthew F said:
What software are most people running on their NAS's? FreeNAS, Linux, Windows Server or are they prebought NAS boxes such as those from WD?
Click to expand...

Synology NAS, not necessarily the cheapest but fast and reliable and the support to back it up is outstanding.
 
If you have all drives on one location it is not a secure backup. I keep it simple and use multiples of two SATA drives, keeping them at different locations. I also find this a lot faster than any NAS I've tried.
 
neil_g said:
how much speed do you need for file storage? i store my music, video and mainly RAW on my NAS over gigabit ethernet and lightroom loads them nice and fast.
Click to expand...
Music and video, very little to read, but write speed can be important if you're moving data around.

What sort of speed to you get with your NAS if you're copying a large file to it? If your strategy is to backup locally and then copy a large amount of data to the NAS, write performance could be very important (FWIW, I can write large files at 107MBytes/sec to my mediaserver which is pretty much saturating the gigabit link between them).
 
arad85 said:
Music and video, very little to read, but write speed can be important if you're moving data around.

What sort of speed to you get with your NAS if you're copying a large file to it? If your strategy is to backup locally and then copy a large amount of data to the NAS, write performance could be very important (FWIW, I can write large files at 107MBytes/sec to my mediaserver which is pretty much saturating the gigabit link between them).
Click to expand...

if the nas is your main storage then you wouldnt be moving stuff around all to often.

windows reports 70mb/s writing to the nas from desktop over gigabit.

Karl12347 said:
People are getting smarter nowadays and using cloud storage for data backups. I wouldn't bother with buying or creating a nas box. Cloud is getting really cheap ATM.
Click to expand...

cloud is great if you have small data storage or deep pockets and large amounts of bandwidth.

not ideal if you have tb's and a rubbish internet.. lol
 
neil_g said:
if the nas is your main storage then you wouldnt be moving stuff around all to often.
Click to expand...
Depends on your backup strategy of the NAS ;)

neil_g said:
windows reports 70mb/s writing to the nas from desktop over gigabit.
Click to expand...
That's not too shabby... I was getting 40ish from Win7 to WinXp single disk->single disk.
 
arad85 said:
Depends on your backup strategy of the NAS ;)
Click to expand...

i use the USB port in the back of the NAS :)

That's not too shabby... I was getting 40ish from Win7 to WinXp single disk->single disk.
Click to expand...

yeah its pretty good (about twice the speed of my old netgear readynas), you can bridge the twin gigabit in my nas if you have a compatible switch. unfortunately i dont so i just run failover.
 
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