Help with back up options

[JamesMay82]

I'm a bit exposed from a back up point of view my Lacie 2big drives have failed (enclosure still appears to work) and now all my data is reliant on my Drobo 5c which is a scary prospect as its very flakey.

I need 11tb of storage to cover my current needs which I've built up over the last 12 years so I'm thinking I should get 20TB to future proof it.

my questions are

1. what would everyone buy?
2. I'm thinking of buying a Lacie 2 big 20TB and keep in Raid 0 as my daily useable hard drive for all my files and then use the Drobo as the Master back up while it lasts and when it fails potentially buy another Lacie 2 big in raid 0 to become an archive drive.

Thanks

ps I've been reading about Drobo tonight at it looks like they might be in trouble as everything is OOS on their site.

 

[glenthompson]

I’m not a fan of Raid 0 since one drive failure takes down the entire array. I would consider a Synology NAS with space for at least 4 drives. Put 10 tb drives and get 30 tb of fault tolerant storage.

Another option is to attach a JBOD enclosure to a Mac mini as a server. Then back the whole thing up to BackBlaze. Add more enclosures as needs change.

 

[MevetS]

Have you considered an offsite backup solution? I use Backblaze (I just saw glenthompson noted BackBlaze as well). It took a while to upload all of my drives but now it states up to date 'continuously' backing up.

In addition to that I have mirrored drives locally, using ChronoSync to automatically back up the working drives to the back ups. I just have duplicate drives, in a couple of OWC drive enclosures (again, echoing glenthompson). For example, one of my hobbies is photography. So I have a working drive for my RAW images, and a mirror backup drive for that. And a working drive for my processed images, and a mirror backup drive for that. The working and mirror drives are in different enclosures. And the working drives are backed up with BackBlaze.

Good luck whatever you decide.

 

[2984839]

RAID 0 is the wrong choice if reliability is what you need. I would definitely never trust 11 TB of data to it. A failure of either disk wrecks the whole array, so you actually double your risk of drive failure data loss vs having a single disk and no RAID.

RAID 1 makes a lot of sense here, since you mentioned buying only 2 drives. That would mirror one drive to the other and would survive if one disk failed. RAID 6 would be another option, but you need 4 disks and some storage would be lost to parity. On the other hand, you can survive 2 disk failures with RAID 6.

Personally, I'd go with RAID 1 with two 20 TB drives. If money is no object, go with RAID 6.

 

[wardie]

I’ve done a fair bit of consumer RAID in the past for solutions and now don’t bother. Disks are so big now (vs their speed) that the recovery time to rebuild an array can be long - and during that time you’re still exposed after a loss (depending on exact config, #disks etc). Personally I’d just get a couple of single disks as big as possible e.g. 20TB and keep a couple of independent backups, plus some/all on cloud depending in your cost appetite. I gave up on my early-days Drobo years ago, didn’t seem to be a configurable and fast RAID.

I do use a small hardware RAID0 unit still (with 2x old SSDs I had lying around) but for performance delivery of certain files on a primary data server, bot backup. As said above RAID0 increases your risk of data loss as a trade off for performance.

 

[ght56]

Knowing a little bit more about your needs, the importance of the data, desired speed, intensity of usage will help speak to a better solution for your needs. Also, are you intending to access this from a singular computer in a DAS situation, or are you looking for something for multiple systems and/or with NAS capability?

If I was in your situation, assuming I needed speed, redundancy, AND major capacity, I would look to a RAID setup to eliminate both the Drobo and the LaCie for a robust DAS solution and then pair it with an offsite backup. This particular setup would provide both redundancy and speed. RAID 10 is often popular for this implementation, as is RAID 5 and 6 depending on the hardware and what you are seeking.

If I had to pick an out of the box product that was ready to go and I was okay with spending a couple pennies, it would probably be a Pegasus32 R4 or R6.

 

[Boyd01]

Have you considered an offsite backup solution? I use Backblaze (I just saw glenthompson noted BackBlaze as well). It took a while to upload all of my drives but now it states up to date 'continuously' backing up.

I have BackBlaze on four different computers and it's great, was able to salvage files from a bad external disk on my old Windows PC recently. But just be aware, BackBlaze only backs up your user files. It doesn't backup the System or Applications folders. So, it would only be one piece of the picture if you need to restore a computer from BackBlaze, you would need to install MacOS and all your software from other sources. BackBlaze is also configured to ignore quite a few file types, regardless of where they are stored, however you can disable this by manually editing the exclusion list.

A few months ago I had a problem where Backblaze stopped backing up my files, although the BackBlaze control panel claimed everything was backed up. I only found out about the problem when I got an automated e-mail saying it had been two weeks since the last backup.

Contacted BackBlaze support and they had me delete the software and re-install. This created some other confusing issues. It was all sorted out eventually and they were very helpful, but the experience didn't inspire a lot of confidence. I will say, however, that this happened on a system running MacOS Sierra (which Apple no longer officially supports). No problems with my Macs on Catalina and Mojave. I have configured Backblaze to send me weekly backup reports now, just to give me a quicker "heads up" for this kind of problem.

One other thing, Backblaze will backup all your external disks with no limit, which is great. However, you must keep the drives mounted for this to happen. If an external disk has been disconnected for awhile (30 days?) the backup will get deleted. They will send warnings about this however. Recently, they added a new feature that will save all your files forever, however that costs more.

 

[JamesMay82]

Thanks for all the replies guys.

The biggest data hog was my iTunes libraries for movies and tv shows which accounts for 8TB of the 11TB of data. I considered some of the options you were giving but I must admit I would love to have them but I was finding the cost prohibitive.

So I've gone down the following route.

I'm going to give up on storing the iTunes movies and tv shows locally and risk them living in the cloud. I know I could lose them if Apple fall out with the studios but I'd say its unlikely. I have downloaded some of my fav shows though to be safe.

Abandoning iTunes keeps the replacement drive costs down and I've bought a Lacie 2 big raid again in raid 0 and then I've removed the Drobo drives and re purposed them into my old lace enclosure which seems to work fine and will be used as a back of the new set up. I might buy one other large single drive to use as an offsite option.

I'll be glad to say goodbye to Drobo as its just horrendous