Proper Backup systems and hardware....advice pls

Hertsman

Hertsman

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Guys, Ive got to admit, whilt I sort of understand how backups are supposed to work, I feel that I dont have a really failsafe system, so am looking for pointers on best practise.

Currently use Crashplan free to BU to a 1tb, but have plans to go way larger as thats full now.

Ive heard of NAS, Raids and all sorts of things, along with the plethora of software available - but how does one really know if its going to work if you do have an issue ?

Currently thinking of 2 4TB Ext HDD and backing up daily to one and a couple of times a week to the other - which would then be kept in a fireproof safe.....

Good idea or not ? Not sure I want to get into ££/M cloud type deal as I still dont really have control of my data.


Also, what happens going forward ? Will we end up with 50TB drives full of data in the same way I have a huge boxfull of printed photos under the bed ?
 
I wrote about my backup system that can be found via my website.

https://spark.adobe.com/page/Os6kX8G8QcZoA/

Basically it consists of:

Working drive (fast 2tb drive)
Onsite backup (3tb raid drive)
Offsite backup (slow 2tb drive)

It’s all automatically backed up via Carbon Copy Cloner. I did have 2 off site back up drives so one was always offsite but recently changed to a g tech hub to tidy my backup drives up and free up USB ports (2 ports were used just for external backup drives). My storage setup covers my needs, so far I have about 750GB so 2TB meets my needs (I could do with culling my RAWs as I likely have a lot of unused rubbish on there).

Being a Mac user I use time machine too so that’s another external drive.

I have thought about cloud storage but my internet speed is far too slow for it to work for me. Cloud storage would be a great option if you can find it cheap enough.
 
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I think we go into far to much detail when backing up. I have my PC hard drive plus

1x external hard drive in the house
1x external hard drive in my draw at work.

I cant be bothered with cloud based things and the odds of me losing all three at the same time is pretty high!
Keep a hard drive off site (at a relatives / friend / work) and you should be pretty good to go.
 
Same. Main storage is a raid5 esata das. Backed up (and encrypted) to a rotation of 2 usb3 drives using Veeam for Windows. 1 drive is always in my work drawer 35 miles from home.
 
neil_g said:
Same. Main storage is a raid5 esata das. Backed up (and encrypted) to a rotation of 2 usb3 drives using Veeam for Windows. 1 drive is always in my work drawer 35 miles from home.
Click to expand...

Hi Neil, could you explain how I do that, and with what in non geek please ? :)
 
I'll describe my backup regime in plain English for you. It's pretty simple.

I have an external hard disk attached to the PC in the office. I use backup software called Sync Back Pro, but I'm sure there are others which do just as good a job. Every night the software runs and creates a complete copy on the backup disk of all the folders I care about. There are seven copies on the backup disk, one for each day of the week, and every night the software over-writes the one from the same day last week. Thus I always have seven days worth of backups on the disk: if I want to recover a file which I created on Monday but accidentally deleted on Tuesday, I'll find it on the Monday night backup.

What the backup software does is conceptually very straightforward:
(1) make a list of a the folders and files on my live system;
(2) find out which of them are already on the backup (which will be the case if they're more than a week old);
(3) copy any that aren't already on the backup to the backup;
(4) delete any files on the backup which aren't on the live system.
This is all fully automated of course, but I've explained it so you can see that at the end of the run the backup is just an exact copy of the live system. That seems quite important to me. It means it's easy to find and restore individual folders and files, and it means I'm not tied into any proprietary software.

When the backup is completed, the software emails me to let me know. So if there's a problem such as the external hard disk failing, I'll know about about it pretty quickly. I can easily replace the external hard disk and then the backup routine will carry on as before.

I also have an identical hard disk attached to the PC at home, and I run the same backup regime on that one too. Every Friday I swap the backup disks over. So I always have 14 backups of the system. For example today the disk in the office had 5 backups of the office system from Tue 1st, Mon 30th, Sun 29th, Sat 28th, and Fri 27th; the disk at home had 7 backups of the office system from Thu 26th, Weds 25th,Tue 24th, Mon 23rd, Sun 22nd, Sat 21st, and Fri 20th: and then the disk in the office also had 2 more backups of the office system from Thu 19th and Weds 18th. Obviously I also have 14 backups of the home system.

If the office burns down, I'll potentially lose a few days worth of data (depending on what day of the week it happens) but I'll always have a backup on the disk at home of the state of the office system as of the previous Friday. That seems to me to strike a reasonable balance between complexity and security. Other people may view this bit differently, of course, and desire a more robust but more complicated approach.

I hope that helps, and persuades you that an effective backup process really doesn't need to be hard work either to design or to implement.
 
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StewartR said:
I'll describe my backup regime in plain English for you. It's pretty simple.

I have an external hard disk attached to the PC in the office. I use backup software called Sync Back Pro, but I'm sure there are others which do just as good a job. Every night the software runs and creates a complete copy on the backup disk of all the folders I care about. There are seven copies on the backup disk, one for each day of the week, and every night the software over-writes the one from the same day last week. Thus I always have seven days worth of backups on the disk: if I want to recover a file which I created on Monday but accidentally deleted on Tuesday, I'll find it on the Monday night backup.

What the backup software does is conceptually very straightforward:
(1) make a list of a the folders and files on my live system;
(2) find out which of them are already on the backup (which will be the case if they're more than a week old);
(3) copy any that aren't already on the backup to the backup;
(4) delete any files on the backup which aren't on the live system.
This is all fully automated of course, but I've explained it so you can see that at the end of the run the backup is just an exact copy of the live system. That seems quite important to me. It means it's easy to find and restore individual folders and files, and it means I'm not tied into any proprietary software.

When the backup is completed, the software emails me to let me know. So if there's a problem such as the external hard disk failing, I'll know about about it pretty quickly. I can easily replace the external hard disk and then the backup routine will carry on as before.

I also have an identical hard disk attached to the PC at home, and I run the same backup regime on that one too. Every Friday I swap the backup disks over. So I always have 14 backups of the system. For example today the disk in the office had 5 backups of the office system from Tue 1st, Mon 30th, Sun 29th, Sat 28th, and Fri 27th; the disk at home had 7 backups of the office system from Thu 26th, Weds 25th,Tue 24th, Mon 23rd, Sun 22nd, Sat 21st, and Fri 20th: and then the disk in the office also had 2 more backups of the office system from Thu 19th and Weds 18th. Obviously I also have 14 backups of the home system.

If the office burns down, I'll potentially lose a few days worth of data (depending on what day of the week it happens) but I'll always have a backup on the disk at home of the state of the office system as of the previous Friday. That seems to me to strike a reasonable balance between complexity and security. Other people may view this bit differently, of course, and desire a more robust but more complicated approach.

I hope that helps, and persuades you that an effective backup process really doesn't need to be hard work either to design or to implement.
Click to expand...
This is why specific backup software works best-it’s automated and does a far better job than a human can. Backup systems can depend on your use (commercial or amateur, and frequency of use-not much point running backups daily if you use the computer once a month).

The software I use does a similar function to Stewart’s. backup tasks are automatically run on disk appearance (I used to have the computer start itself, run backups then close itself in the middle of the night but swapping to powered external drives changed that as everything would have to be constantly powered). Any altered or deleted images are replaced/deleted from the backups but stored for 3 months (a time limit I’ve set) using its ‘safety net’ feature on the onsite backup. I don’t back up the safety net data to the offsite backup as the drive size is smaller. If I lost all of my onsite storage in one go (theft or fire) I would have bigger problems to worry about than a missing photography file from 1-3 months back.
 
Cloud Backup that is automated
 
RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) is a way to allow you to keep working if a single disk drive fails, it is essentially just more than one disk drive which your computer treats as a single disk. NAS (network attached storage) is just some extra storage on your network. Neither of these are really back-ups, as many people have pointed out above, a backup is off-site (or in something like a fireproof safe on site). I have a couple of Solid State Disk drives in USB 3.0 enclosures, which I rotate between off site and on site and I just use xcopy/rsync and a little batch/script. That said it’s probably a lot more robust to use some proper back-up software.

Many years ago I worked for a company that was backing up it’s mail server to tape overnight. The backup became so large that it was taking longer than all-night to back-up and so was delaying things in the mornings. A guy from the out-sourced IT provider responsible for the server decided to split the backup across two tape drives and wrote a script that backed-up all folders starting A-L to one tape and everything N-Z to another tape.

A few months after this regime was introduced the RAID controller failed and corrupted the whole RAID array, no problem, restore from backup except everyone’s mail folder began with M!

So proper backup software, or a good system for testing you backups, is usually a good idea.
 
I have a nas configured in raid 5 where I backup stuff too. Also have the same backed up to the desktop and to 2 separate usb drives, but they are all in the house so not completely protected.
 
I have a raid 5 nas setup at home which gives me 1.5tb of storage. As this was getting full and i have amazon prime they got 1.5tb of photos
 
I've got a script set up that uses rsync to do an incremental backup to a little server I have. It keeps the last 4 backups This is run every evening. The server then sends data to Amazon Glacier every week and also transfers a copy of its storage to a usb disk when plugged in. After every backup it runs clamscan.
 
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