Backup Solution for Multi TB Storage System?

M

Max|m

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Mar 7, 2005
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I am planning on building a storage system for home soon. I think It's going to be 10 x 2TB disks in a RAID 6 configuration running under Openfiler. I know RAID isn't a backup its just data availability. I also know that several users on this forum have storage systems that easily match that. What I don't know is what kind of backup solution would you use to back that data up?

Running multiple servers so one can back the other up seems ridiculous to me. At the same time I don't really see any other reasonable way to back that data up. Most of the data wouldn't be completely necessary to backup but it would take several weeks to restore. I could just backup the stuff I must have but if there is a reasonable way to backup the rest of the data I would definitely prefer that. Any help/suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Max|m
 
I really wish I had an answer for you, I have no idea how you could backup a huge array reasonably... short of making an identical array or something like that... assuming your array would have ~8tb usable, your talking about 160 50gb blu-ray disks... or $1600+ in blu-ray disks

hard disks are just the cheapest/gb storage medium at the moment... not sure about tape but I have 0 confidence in tape-backups... over the years I have seen very few work successfully in a disaster-recovery situation
 
Right now I'm using Mozy to do online backups. I'm using about 5.1TB out of my 11TB array. Right now Mozy still has about 1.3TB to backup. It never backs up data as fast as I add it, but it stays somewhat close.

Since my data is fairly static my long term plans is to buy some 2TB drives to backup data to and then keep offline.
 
shabazkilla said:
Right now I'm using Mozy to do online backups. I'm using about 5.1TB out of my 11TB array. Right now Mozy still has about 1.3TB to backup. It never backs up data as fast as I add it, but it stays somewhat close.

Since my data is fairly static my long term plans is to buy some 2TB drives to backup data to and then keep offline.
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damn, how much do you pay for that?

have you looked at intronis?
 
Well so far I've uploaded 3.7TB in 189 days. That works out to roughly 19.5 gigs a day uploaded. I've had some problems with the Mozy client terminating, etc and some times I go a few days before I catch it so the actually amount transferred in a 'full' day should be slightly higher.
 
Unless the solution is off site, I wouldn't even consider it. RAID provides "protection" against failure of the components (which should be your first concern). The next risk is probably accidental deletion. If this is personal storage, I'd skip that concern. I really hope I'm never drunk enough to delete my own stuff. On second thought... But seriously, I'd only be concerned about acts of God and man (theft). In those cases, you need off site backup.

And a link for good measure: http://www.dell.com/us/en/business/storage/tapebackup_libraries/ct.aspx?refid=tapebackup_libraries&s=bsd&cs=04
 
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I'd avoid tapes, for the cost of the tape drive you could buy 5 or 6 2tb drives and make a copy of the array and store it offsite.
 
Tapes serve a purpose... but probably not one that would help in this case. I still thought I'd throw it out there.
 
Adidas4275 said:
I would buy 2TB individual drives as I needed them....
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And then mail them to a relative in another part of the world.

I used to laugh about the off site storage we did across the street. Mind you, this was in Tampa, Florida and our servers (and the building across the street) were 11 feet above sea level. A category 1 hurricane would have demolished everything.
 
I agree with the others here. I think the idea of buying 2TB disks and filling them up as needed is probably the simplest and cheapest solution. This assumes you have relatively static data, which I suspect is the case for most home users who have anything close to 10TB. I use a service from CrashPlan which is similarly priced to Mozy, though I keep telling myself I should back up to 2TB drives as well and ship them somewhere safe..

BackBlaze is another one you could look into. Before signing up for offsite backup, I'd consider asking each of them what their policies are for bandwidth throttling so that you know if they will slow you down when you reach a certain backup size. Carbonite does this (down to ~100 kbps) once you approach 200GB, so they are useless for something like this.
 
I perosnally use an online service for really critical items, but then for more of the static stuff (media, music, etc..) I have a networked hard drive at a relative's house around 200 miles away that is connected over their broadband access service. The drive is mounted locally on servers at my house, and overnight any changes are synced up over the net.

This has a couple benefits over the standard online approach. If I have a massive loss and need to restore, I can drive to the site and pick up the drive and bring it back home for a restore over the LAN. It also allows me to decide how much storage I want to have since it's just adding drives - and no monthly fee attached. It's just basically the cost of the drives.

For a small amount of data to restore, it's no big deal to do that via an online service. But even over a fast connection, how long will it take to restore a couple TB of data?
 
Mike - good points.

One thing about CrashPlan that is nice is that it actually allows you to back up to another computer you have authorization to back up to if that is what you want to set up. For someone who wants a relatively painless configuration of such an offsite backup, their UI works fairly well.

Re: restoring from an offsite location via broadband, it'd definitely take a long time, even with FIOS-like speeds, you'd be talking about weeks to back up a large multi-terabyte dataset.
 
shabazkilla said:
Well so far I've uploaded 3.7TB in 189 days. That works out to roughly 19.5 gigs a day uploaded. I've had some problems with the Mozy client terminating, etc and some times I go a few days before I catch it so the actually amount transferred in a 'full' day should be slightly higher.
Click to expand...

Wow, I'm jealous of your connection... But for a lot of people around the country, that wouldn't be feasible in any way, that amount of data would crush the limits of even those ISPs w/reasonably high bandwith caps. I'm actually still on 1MB/512K DSL (might upgrade to 2/512 eventually) because the cable co. down here has a ridiculous 20GB a MONTH bandwith cap... Or was it 40GB? It's way too little either way, so I've stuck w/my crappy DSL, gets better ping times online anyway (but seems to suffer from outages more often than cable does).
 
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