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The best way to backup! 10TB

PicnicTutorials

PicnicTutorials

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 29, 2013
546
13
I will assume I'm in the wrong forum feel free to move this...

Let's brain storm the best backup solution. I think I have got it. Simple documents are easy. 4G yeah Dropbox easy. I'm talking 10TB of videos and pics.

First 10TB on connected external hard drive. Made assable to homes TV's via Plex and Roku. Second same 10TB backed up on disconnected external hard drive. 3rd backed up and stored at parents house (in case house burns down). 4th backed up via crash plan (This will take a while). 5th time machine (local stuff 100GB). 6th Cubby (Dropbox alternative simple local docs 5GB). 7th Carbon copy cloner kept on discounted external hard drive.

I used to use Phanfare to backup all my videos and photos but now that videos are 4K uploads are just too time consuming and riddled with bugs. So I recently made this switch. I have lost everything before and it won't ever happen again. I believe this is overkill but I also believe the piece of mind is worth it.
 
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What does "best" mean? Pie in the sky? Practical?

I back up my boot drive with Time Machine, a couple of destinations: A Time Capsule in a different room on a different UPS, and an external portable drive which is stored elsewhere.

I have a RAID6 array which I back up to a normally-disconnected (data and power) RAID5 array. I use a locally-compiled version of rsync (just to make sure I am up to date).

Offsite would be nice, but as I am in a hard-to-burn-down building, I will risk it.

A.
 
Too much!
But, too much is way better than "whoops! where's my backup?"
You have a backup plan. I don't think anyone can legitimately say "you have too many backups"

How about a couple of anecdotes with - not-so-good plans?

Be sure to sample-test each of your backups occasionally. (Make sure that you do actually have access, and that files are usable/recoverable). I had one customer who thought they had a great backup plan, with local and remote backups. They used the same "bargain" server system both locally and remotely (don't recall specifics now), and each had failures that caused irreparable corruption to storage on three separate drive arrays. The customer lost everything, except one local backup that was only for most recent files. Older files - all gone.
And, they ignored repeated warnings, had poor IT support, along with bad advice that they got from some forum somewhere (not here!), just a huge number of bad things that happened all at once.
I do remember several bad days hearing a lot of yelling (not at me...) and a couple of folks that should have known better were fired on the spot.

And, that's not quite as bad as a supervisor that I had once who "swore that he was completely safe", by storing daily backups for 4 years on the internal boot drive (same drive that that ran the computer and all their software, all "backed up" to the same drive, with no external backups), using folders created each day, and wouldn't agree with ANY advice that meant spending some money. You can guess what happened with that!
 
Build 3x FreeNAS boxes and do ZFS replication between them. Maybe HP N54Ls with 4x 4TB disks in RAID-Z in them. You can often find bare-bones ones for sale for $200 or so new. Add another 8 GB to each for caching, a USB stick and fill with drives.

They're not too big/heavy to lug off-site when you need to do so.

Use one as your primary, and rotate the other 2 off-site monthly so you always maintain an off-site backup.


edit:
unless you've got really good internet, cloud backup of 10 TB is going to be quite painful. If you ever need to do a recovery from disaster, downloading 10 TB is going to be a long recovery time, and getting 10 TB uploaded in the first place is likely to be even worse.

You could even do replication over the internet between the FreeNAS boxes above, but the first sync would be a lot less painful done over gigabit ethernet locally first :D
 
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I used two Synology NAS boxes with rsync directly scheduled on the device to copy data from A to B in order to keep the two up to date.

I set the logon data, path and that's it, real simple.
 
If it's videos and pics, I recommend using two Lightroom catalogues.

This ensures you do not miss any files and you can import more files to your backup drive ad hoc.
 
I do a lot of photography, and I run everything from a Synology NAS with two 6TB RED drives. All RAW files as well as exports are run/saved from/to the NAS, the Lightroom catalogs are on my local computer.

I have a CCC schedule that backs up all my catalogs from the computers the the NAS as well.

Other than that I have Time Machine on the NAS as well which carries the catalogs in case something happens with the CCC backups.

I then have 3 2TB drives and one 4Tb drive that I backup the NAS to (also with a CCC schedule). These drives are not connected to anything unless they are being used to back up to.

Two of those 4 drives are not stored at my place.

I get about 120mb/s read and write with the NAS, which is fast enough for Lightroom etc. Each RAW file from my DSLR is about 25mb in size. Its also fast when editing externally from Lightroom, to Photoshop for example, when creating large TIFFs or PSD files.
 
Dubadai said:
Sorry if there were unclear things in my post. The only thing I feel that I was unclear about was maybe CCC.

CCC - Carbon Copy Cloner

But like you said, Google is your friend ;)
Click to expand...

It was a Blanket statement. let me go back and look at yours. Regardless though nothing to apologize about
 
if a high quality movie file is about 3GB then a 10TB is about 3,333 movies. If you watch a movie a day it will take you about 9 years to go through all of it.

What do you store on a 10TB?!?
 
PicnicTutorials said:
I will assume I'm in the wrong forum feel free to move this...

Let's brain storm the best backup solution. I think I have got it. Simple documents are easy. 4G yeah Dropbox easy. I'm talking 10TB of videos and pics.

First 10TB on connected external hard drive. Made assable to homes TV's via Plex and Roku. Second same 10TB backed up on disconnected external hard drive. 3rd backed up and stored at parents house (in case house burns down). 4th backed up via crash plan (This will take a while). 5th time machine (local stuff 100GB). 6th Cubby (Dropbox alternative simple local docs 5GB). 7th Carbon copy cloner kept on discounted external hard drive.

I used to use Phanfare to backup all my videos and photos but now that videos are 4K uploads are just too time consuming and riddled with bugs. So I recently made this switch. I have lost everything before and it won't ever happen again. I believe this is overkill but I also believe the piece of mind is worth it.
Click to expand...

For 4K you some like the OWC thunderbolt 2 Mini and populate it with the best SSDs you can buy and run it in raid 0 for the best speeds. ( see the blog post Create RAID in El Captain.)

For everything else I suggest something like a NAS like DS216+ to see 4K video. Then for massive storage something like the RS815.
 
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I've had to answer that question myself a couple of times. I work IT at a church and we needed a backup solution for our server and something hold our sermon videos as an archive and backup recording location.

My solution has ended up being a couple of 5 bay RAID USB 3.0/eSATA/FW800 boxes. They are used on a 2010 Mac Pro and our Dell PowerEdge server.

The box itself is fairly cheap: Oyen DigitalMobius 5-Bay
And then I stuffed them full of 6TB WD Red NAS hard drives. 5x6TB drives minus one (drive size) for RAID5 parity comes out to about 24TB unformatted. It's still a lot though and way cheaper and faster locally than a NAS.

I've put a USB 3.0 PCIe card in the server and Mac Pro and it'll hit north of 300 MB/s read and write assuming your source is as fast (8TB RAID 0 in the Mac Pro, and a 10TB 5 disk SAS RAID5 in the server).

One holds recordings of our sermons and music from the Mac Pro (streams of 1080i/60 ProRes), and the other is an Acronis/Storagecraft backup of the server (Windows 2008 R2).

For the backup, I do it once a week and store it in a safe during the rest of the week. I'd like to get offsite backups but uploading all of it between the two and our other RAID and NAS boxes around campus would be around 50TB of data and would take forever and cost a lot. I'm thinking of burning long term M-disc BluRay copies of the sermons since they don't get modified once they are edited and rendered in Premiere. But the server backup will just have to stay on the RAID.
 
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