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Best solution for redundancy backup with external drives

S

sinitry23

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 30, 2009
34
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I am looking for a good solution for redundancy backup with external drives. What would be the best way to achieve this?

(1) Raid 1, mirror external drive 8tb (4tb mirror raid)
(1) 4TB external drive

I would like to store all my work on the raid 1 mirror drive but have an exact duplicate copy of all the data on a separate external drive.

-What is the best way to mirror both drives?
-Instead of copy and pasting the data is there a software that can check for duplicate files and copy only new data?
 
I use CCC for that purpose, it just works. There are others but I can't comment on reliability, ease of use, or features. CCC will check file revision dates and only copies those that have changed. It can also be set to archive changed files instead of overwriting them. Your choice.

I have one RAID set for performance and then backup that volume to another drive on a daily CCC schedule. Seamless.
 
I researched this for quite a while and never found an easy encrypted raid solution. What I ended up doing was using a 2Big thunderbolt drive with two internal drives. Rather than setting them up in RAID I just have Time machine alternate backups between the two drives. At most my second drive is 2 hours old .
 
I use 2Big 6TB in RAID 1 for 3TB mirrored. My 3TB Time Capsule backed up the internal SSD and the external 2Big set. You might want to use 4TB drives while my system is based on 3TB drives.
 
sinitry23 said:
I will setup raid 1 for the main external drive. I want another back up copy of the all the data to another external drive. What would be the best way to do this beside manually copy and paste?
Click to expand...

Why don't you just set up a RAID 1 with three drives? That gives you what you want: Three drives with exactly the same data on them.

The RAID1 implementation of Disk Utility creates exact copies that can operate autonomously. You can take either of the drives and use it without the others, they're even bootable on their own.
 
Giuly said:
Why don't you just set up a RAID 1 with three drives? That gives you what you want: Three drives with exactly the same data on them.

The RAID1 implementation of Disk Utility creates exact copies that can operate autonomously. You can take either of the drives and use it without the others, they're even bootable on their own.
Click to expand...
This doesn't solve the problem of what happens if you get a corrupted file system on the mirror or you've sdeleted stuff by accident. It's good to have a separate backup.
 
sinitry23 said:
I would like to store all my work on the raid 1 mirror drive but have an exact duplicate copy of all the data on a separate external drive.
Click to expand...

Perhaps I don't fully understand, but why not use standard backup software?

There's a couple of those, but I use Crashplan. At my workplace, I've got an MBA and an external USB drive. Crashplan creates one backup and saves it to another bigger server running somewhere on the network.
 
sinitry23 said:
I will setup raid 1 for the main external drive. I want another back up copy of the all the data to another external drive. What would be the best way to do this beside manually copy and paste?
Click to expand...

I think Giuly was suggesting you create a software RAID-1 utilizing multiple external hardware RAID-1 systems. They will be treated as separate mirrored drives, plus being hardware RAID-1 they will each provide their own redundancy. Using a pair of 2-drive RAID-1 boxes this way will create 4 distinct copies of your data on 2 distinct external systems. This way a massive failure (power supply) in one of the external backup systems won't take out the drives in the other backup system too.

If you are using TimeMachine for a historical backup, you can simply add additional external drives or drive systems to the device list and they will be sequentially used by the hourly TimeMachine backup.


-howard
 
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