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Backup Strategy - please critique

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I agree RAID with huge drives (4TB and bigger) is not something I do either, especially on the small NAS boxes (2 or 4 drives). With 6 drive bays or more though, I setup the NAS OS on at least a RAID1 array and have the rest of the drives for data storage and online backups (manually incurred).

This has saved me many hours of rebuilding a NAS from scratch as usually, only one drive will go at a time. But I always recommend to customers to buy two drives if one fails (because the one that is still going is most likely going to fail too).
 
I do use RAID, but only RAID0 for performance reasons. Plenty of back-ups of the setup though (server and desktop both running 2x3TB RAID0 with data mirrored between the machines and a 5TB USB3 single disk backing it all up).
 
Your comments gave me pause. I hadn't considered that the extra wear the rebuilds were imposing on the drives. And I now believe I should be glad that the RAID 1 enclosure will soft-disconnect from its host when a tray is removed. That forced me to manually unmount the RAID-1 volume or shut down the system before removing the tray. (The trays have their own connectors with the backplane in the enclosure, so there should be no direct wear on the SATA connectors themselves.) In the last year or so, I've shifted to using it in JBOD mode, with each disk being a discrete Time Machine target. I'm still not super comfortable using EXT3 / EXT4 for a file system simply because if the NAS dies, it isn't clear to me that I can connect an EXT3 or EXT4 disk on a Mac directly and perform a Time Machine restore. But some NASs seem to have a button or perhaps a schedule with which they back up the stored data to a USB disk (authenticated backup would be better) so perhaps I should take a look at a 2 bay NAS, now that it is 2015.

In JBOD mode, just use HFS+. There's no reason to format EXT3/4 for a USB-attached disk. Although getting rid of RAID would allow you to mount drives individually, so I think you've made the right choice there.

I was commenting previously on your apprehension with purchasing a NAS. As long as you don't use RAID (and I really don't recommend it for a home NAS anyway) EXT3/4 drives can be mountable in OS X and Windows. Even better, use a USB enclosure and backup your NAS to external drives. Those can often be formatted NTFS or similar so that you can directly mount them even easier in the event you need to restore something.

Honestly, I think your apprehension is a bit overblown. I'm a Mac user and use a tiered backup strategy that includes a QNAP NAS. It works very well.
 
I do use RAID, but only RAID0 for performance reasons. Plenty of back-ups of the setup though (server and desktop both running 2x3TB RAID0 with data mirrored between the machines and a 5TB USB3 single disk backing it all up).
Trouble with RAID mirroring, or block level mirroring is the file system is replicated to include corruptions and malware in the file system. That's why I use two volumes in my little 2 bay, w/2x 3TB. Plus USB3 backup. Plus VIP folders to SD card within NAS. And selected non-private files to ADrive on the internet.
All automated.
 
I say mirroring, but it is across machines, so technically it is backed up. Separate machines, separate volumes.
 
I mirror data across machines as well. I also use versioning, so even if a corruption or deletion gets propagated to the backup, I still have the previous version.
 
I mirror data across machines as well. I also use versioning, so even if a corruption or deletion gets propagated to the backup, I still have the previous version.

I think the common use of the disk I/O term Mirroring is one drive being a byte/sector copy of another. So the file system is replicated.
Copying to a different system may or may not be at the sector/block level (iSCSI, rSync, vs. file system APIs).

Maybe the cross-file-system term is "replication"
it's all fuzzy.
 
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Yeah, depending on what system, OS, and software you are using, it seems terms like "mirror", "image", and "clone" all have relative meanings.
 
Greetings! Serious photography enthusiast here whose current storage solution is fading away with all the digital images I have been (and will be) creating. As such, I am adding more storage, while at the same time, implementing a new backup strategy. My current setup is very simple. One user (myself), running a 2015 edition MacBook Pro (1 TB drive). Most of my 2015 images are there. I also have a 1 TB external HDD where all of my 2014 (and earlier images reside). This drive is also partitioned for Time Machine backups. Finally, I have an Amazon S3 account where I also backup (via Jungle Disk) to act as my "offsite" backup. That is it. Here is what I am thinking about ... please let me know your thoughts:

LaCie3TB d2 Thunderbolt 2 External Hard Drive:
This would be my main image storage drive. I would plan to get most, if not all, of my images off my MacBook Pro, and onto this drive

LaCie6TB d2 Thunderbolt 2 External Hard Drive
This would be my main backup storage drive. I would use Apple’s Time Machine app to backup my photo storage LaCie3TB drive above, plus the drive inside my computer, plus my other 1 TB HDD that I would bring on the road with my when I go on the road for some travel photography. Time Machine would keep backing up until it fills the entire 6TB drive, then it deletes the oldest backup - which would be old enough at that point to not care about it. If the main 3TB photo drive should ever get corrupted, all I would have to do is reformat it, enter Time Machine, and place the backed up folders on the drive from this drive. Super simple, I think ...

In lieu of cloud storage, I would put this 6TB drive into a fireproof safe (when I travel) in my closet far away from my office. In the future, as online storage begins to get faster, that would inevitably become another viable option. But, trying to back up 6TB to an online server daily would take a long time to accomplish that large of a data transfer in our current market. But, I could be wrong ...

Thoughts/comments??? Thanks!

I have a NAS and backup hard drives as well! I got the WD MyCloud for cheap on Amazon - 8TB. I love it for what it does. If you want an easy setup and management, I would go this route. But, I'm sure Synology and others have better "Pro" Features. Amazon also has a WD 2TB for 70$ right now...can't beat that! Saw it on gizmodo.com link
 
Quite interesting that there would be a new posting to this thread a day after reading this Slashdot thread:

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story...-way-to-backup-large-amounts-of-personal-data

Somebody with 4TB of storage over time to be backed up - yep, they have a problem in many ways...

First is "why", once that is solved, then the "how" is a bit easier to deal with - and this is not a trivial problem...

20 years of being digital can get to that point - and when you look at that bulk store - it's complicated - but also perhaps digital hordage, and how much of that data is duplicated across different directories...
 
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