I would appreciate advice on a backup solution so we can safely abandon our "sunsetted" but beloved Mac Pro for a Mac Mini. What I think we want is a 4-bay USB3 (Thunderbolt) enclosure/dock for 3.5" SATA. So long as we can fit everything on a single spindle I don't want RAID, just 4 independently mounted drives - but requiring only a single USB port (or Thunderbolt of course).
A possible solution is the StarTech 4 Bay eSATA USB 3.0 to SATA Hard Drive Docking Station for 2.5/3.5 HDD.
Here's the simple, reliable backup strategy we currently use on Mac Pro. It uses four 1 TB drives as follows:
Drive: function
1: boot and all data
2: nightly bootable clone
3: nightly bootable clone
4: Time Machine backup
The clones are automatically generated every night by SuperDuper! using Smart Update, about 20 minutes for 700GB.
A single RAID 5 scheme will not protect our data as well as simple redundancy, unless we invest in a backup scheme for the RAID. And the folks who are serious about large data security require at least a redundant pair of RAID 5 so that gremlins in the RAID don't take down the system. Plus backups of the RAID.
So in addition to the complexity and elapsed time required to deal with RAID drive faults and upgrades, then we have to have more hardware and procedures to assure overall reliability. If we needed zero-downtime performance the RAID would be justified. But our requirement isn't zero downtime it's to be rebooted and running again in 5 minutes or less. If we have to recover the last few hours of changes via TimeMachine that's not an issue.
Any thoughts, recommendations would be much appreciated!.
PS- please don't recommend Drobo RAID. Sounds great, but bad things can happen making the whole stack useless.
A possible solution is the StarTech 4 Bay eSATA USB 3.0 to SATA Hard Drive Docking Station for 2.5/3.5 HDD.
Here's the simple, reliable backup strategy we currently use on Mac Pro. It uses four 1 TB drives as follows:
Drive: function
1: boot and all data
2: nightly bootable clone
3: nightly bootable clone
4: Time Machine backup
The clones are automatically generated every night by SuperDuper! using Smart Update, about 20 minutes for 700GB.
A single RAID 5 scheme will not protect our data as well as simple redundancy, unless we invest in a backup scheme for the RAID. And the folks who are serious about large data security require at least a redundant pair of RAID 5 so that gremlins in the RAID don't take down the system. Plus backups of the RAID.
So in addition to the complexity and elapsed time required to deal with RAID drive faults and upgrades, then we have to have more hardware and procedures to assure overall reliability. If we needed zero-downtime performance the RAID would be justified. But our requirement isn't zero downtime it's to be rebooted and running again in 5 minutes or less. If we have to recover the last few hours of changes via TimeMachine that's not an issue.
Any thoughts, recommendations would be much appreciated!.
PS- please don't recommend Drobo RAID. Sounds great, but bad things can happen making the whole stack useless.