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Backup Solution?

K

KMR

n00b
Joined
Oct 20, 2012
Messages
21
Howdy Folks,

I need some opinions on backup solutions for my home server and media collection. Currently my media collection is under 3TB so a 3TB server drive and a 3TB mirror drive sitting on a shelf has done the trick. But my media collection is growing. I am planning an all-in-one server build based on ESXi that will run FreeNas as a VM. I will be using ECC RAM for this build. I plan on using a RAID setup (M1015 passed through to FreeNas as HBA) and then have the drives on the shelves as backup. As my storage grows I will buy more drives to put on the shelves but after a while it will become very cumbersome to backup my collection with any frequency. For example, how would I do incremental backups on a collection of 6TB+ with this configuration? A dual NAS setup would be quite costly upfront so I'm wondering what types of backup solutions everyone here has?

Thanks!
 
I don't backup my media collection. Except for photos and videos of my grandkids and that is not much.


You can use DOS xcopy with parameters to backup changes from the last month to a hard drive. Run it once a month. If you have 3TB already, 3TB more will fit onto a single hard drive.
 
I don't personally know any, but I've heard tell of some folks who can back up most of their media collection with a list of magnet links. :eek:
 
For 6TB I wouldn't bother with anything dedicated to be honest. I got ten times that and yes it's getting cumbersome.
 
So are you folks using a RAID setup with a couple of parity drives and then just backing up the stuff that you can't get again? For example: backing up your family photos and personal documents but leaving all of the media you have on DVD without digital backups?
 
No and Yes.

I don't use RAID.

Becasue I have some obligation to backup our business data, I have a multitude of backups of family stuff. I have 3 backup drives connected all the time. I nightly incremental backups and start a new full backp every month. So every year I get at least 36 backup copies of our stuff. Stuff that is 3 years old has 100+ copies.

---

I think I have 5 hard drives covering the last 15 years stored in my garage and another 5 in a safe deposit box.

It dawns on me that perhaps I should have the data spread over more hard drives rather than fewer. I will have to think about that. Time for the year end routine - take last years data off the server and store it in the garage and safe deposit box. Get new hard drives for the server.
 
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I don't have +2TB of data on my storage server but I am at 1.5TB. I don't back up my media, only my documents and personal photos and videos which is still 500GB of data. I am backing up everything on CrashPlan. I also have my computers backing up to CrashPlan center and then shot term backups on my storage server.

I don't think it would be easy to use the separate drive to backup to. If you use ZFS I think you could have different pools and do zfs send commands to keep them in sync.
 
My personal documents total about 500GB so that is easy to backup multiple times. The media collection is pretty easy to deal with at this point as well, it just means a spare 3TB hard drive on a shelf. I want to avoid, for example, having 3x 3TB drives with Movies: A-G on drive 1, Movies: H-P on drive 2, and Movies: Q - Z on drive 3. Managing this would be a nightmare when drive 1 passed 3TB requiring a reorganization of all three drives or when the total storage passed 9TB requiring a fourth drive and a reorganization of all drives.
After thinking about this a dual NAS system seems like the best way to manage frequent incremental backups of everything without dedicating an entire day to make sure everything is right. However, the initial cost of a dual NAS system would be frighting, not to mention I could never talk my wife into it. I guess I will just have to backup my favorite stuff and re-rip everything else if something bad happens?
Hopefully ZFS + ECC Ram will allow me to sleep at night without nightmares of wasted hours ripping DVD's.
Does anyone run a RAIDZ(n) setup and backup their large media collection? Would love to hear how people do it (or don't do it) and their reasoning.

Thanks,
 
3TB HDD - $129

That's 120 BD discs.
Eventhough cost is the same, cost of drive and split up files and storage, and risking loss or damage, makes BD not a good value for backups.

B and H no longer sells Tape Drives.
 
Basically, these are your choices:

  1. Limit the files/data that you backup

    Only backup the most critical and irreplaceable files. Mostly, what you're trading off here is your time vs the cost of a larger system that can backup everything. At worst, you have to re-rip your 7000 DVDs and 1200 Blu-ray movies. You don't lose any data, but as they say, time is money.

  2. Another storage server with the same or greater amount of space

    Doesn't have to be fast or use enterprise-rated drives. Doesn't need RAID. Just needs space. When you get into a large amount of storage, your drives will comprise the bulk of your costs. You can build a storage server around them for a few hundred dollars, or the cost of a couple of drives.

  3. No backup - rely on RAID

    Only protects you against disk failures, and absolutely nothing else. Doesn't protect your data from deletion or corruption. Doesn't protect you against, fire, flood or theft.

  4. Individual external hard drives

    This can require a lot of manual work every time you do a backup, and eventually becomes too cumbersome, but you can (theoretically) keep growing this method forever. It also becomes more difficult to mange when backing up a large array with a single partition onto many smaller drives.

  5. Some type of online backup

    Not really feasible for a very large amount of data unless you can first seed it by sending your data to the backup operator on hard drives. Its success will depend a lot on your internet connections speed. If you actually need to do a large data restoration, it can take days to weeks unless you can (again) rely on disks being shipped back and forth.
 
KMR said:
I want to avoid, for example, having 3x 3TB drives with Movies: A-G on drive 1, Movies: H-P on drive 2, and Movies: Q - Z on drive 3. Managing this would be a nightmare when drive 1 passed 3TB requiring a reorganization of all three drives or when the total storage passed 9TB requiring a fourth drive and a reorganization of all drives.
Click to expand...
I tihnk you are not seeing the proper plan.

When all 3 drives are full, add 2 new drives - one between the A-G and H-P drives and one between the H-P and Q-Z drives.

As space is required and time allows move some of the G and H files to the first added drive and move some of the P and Q files to the second drive. If you upsize the new drives, over time you can move data off the smaller drives and upsize those also.

---

I rip less than 20 DVDs a month. It takes 1 cut and paste copy and under an hour to move 20 4GB files from one drive to another. I do that once every few months. I try to keep my hard drives under 90% full, that makes it easy to move files as I need.
 
For that specific problem the solution is called drive pooling. I use Liquesce.
 
Aesma said:
For that specific problem the solution is called drive pooling. I use Liquesce.
Click to expand...

Can you use drive pooling with external drives that are attached to a system one or two at a time?

I've managed a large JBOD server, without drive pooling, and it's not that big of a deal. When they need reorganized, you launch a large file transfer, go to bed. Do another the next night. It's not like you're busting rocks with a sledgehammer in the afternoon sun.

Doing it with external drives, though, would be beyond my patience threshold.
 
I have two NAS's for media comprising 19TB of useable space right now there is only about 5TB of free space between the two. This data is mirrored to a tower running a C2D, 8GB of RAM, a 320GB boot drive, Windows Server 2012 and 16 drives connected to two raid adapters totalling about 25TB of storage. I realize this is excessive to some and over budget for others, its just my backup solution.
 
JJ Johnson said:
Can you use drive pooling with external drives that are attached to a system one or two at a time?

I've managed a large JBOD server, without drive pooling, and it's not that big of a deal. When they need reorganized, you launch a large file transfer, go to bed. Do another the next night. It's not like you're busting rocks with a sledgehammer in the afternoon sun.

Doing it with external drives, though, would be beyond my patience threshold.
Click to expand...

The idea is to have a pool on your computer, meaning new files go to new drives, regardless of order.

You backup each drive separately, independently of the pool.
 
KMR said:
Howdy Folks,

I need some opinions on backup solutions for my home server and media collection. Currently my media collection is under 3TB so a 3TB server drive and a 3TB mirror drive sitting on a shelf has done the trick. But my media collection is growing. I am planning an all-in-one server build based on ESXi that will run FreeNas as a VM. I will be using ECC RAM for this build. I plan on using a RAID setup (M1015 passed through to FreeNas as HBA) and then have the drives on the shelves as backup. As my storage grows I will buy more drives to put on the shelves but after a while it will become very cumbersome to backup my collection with any frequency. For example, how would I do incremental backups on a collection of 6TB+ with this configuration? A dual NAS setup would be quite costly upfront so I'm wondering what types of backup solutions everyone here has?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

I use Retrospect Professional edition. I'm backing up 4 systems in a home LAN, and I recently had to do a bare metal restore for one system. It worked fine. It's not exactly cheap, but I can decide what to back up, and schedule backups. Unlike simple "imaging" systems, it backs up only new or changed files, snapshots the drive every time it runs a backup, and it maintains multiple sets of backup. That means you can restore even file that you backed up several cycle ago.

Also, I start a completely fresh backup cycle every year, and store the prior years' backups away from my system. I'm also thinking of doing a copy of all my prior years' backups and storing that copy offsite, say in my safety deposit box.
 
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