Safe Back-up Query

Innocent Bystander posted:

 

Rhetorical questions: what if your CDs were burnt in a fire as well as the NAS, where's your proof to the insurance company? Do you keep receipts for Downloaded music? What about receipts for your CDs to verify that you bought them not stole them? Indeed, do you keep receipts of everything you've bought that you still posess? And in the remarkable event that you do, are they in a fireproof safe? Etc etc

That's why it's best to rip and sell.

feeling_zen posted:

If you are comfortable with mounting hetrogenous file systems and think you can manage that using what backup disks you have after a failure on whatever NAS is used that is fine (and certainly, most Linux boxes can mount most file systems). But, if this starts sounding a bit of a "you what and you what?" type of sceanrio, then an external drive where the backup is not of the volume but of the files (so the volume type of filesystem are not relevent) is far simpler. That means again, something like a USB drive with differential file backup to a disk that is something simple and easily understood by many systems... FAT32 or UFS for example.

You can then be pretty sure that if the moon explodes and your NAS dies and you loose everything, then a new NAS will almost definately understand the data on the USB drive and, as some have mentioned, if it doesn't support USB storage, you can always plug the drive into your Mac/PC and drag the files over to the new NAS. Remember, for the backup to be as resilient as possible it needs to be as universal as possible. If you're not completely comfortable with handling filesystems, then FAT, FAT32 or UFS are probably the way to go for the offline backup.

What you don't want is being stuck with backup data intact but struggling to find a new NAS or a system that can extract it.

My NAS can backup over USB to a FAT32 formatted drive, but it's not that difficult to tell OSX how to read/write to ext4. What I still need to find out, is whether what's on the back-up disc, is actually intelligible to OSX when directly mounted. Should know by tomorrow.

GraemeH posted:

Thanks gents, paricularly FEELING_ZEN who hit the nail on the head in terms of the answers beginning to go a bit over my head (sorry folks).

A USB hard disk is where I'm headed.

G

A reliable USB hard disk, is definitely a no brainer.

However, I find there is one major drawback. I obviously keep mine in a safe place, but quite often forget where the safe place is.

Does you PC do USB3.

EJS posted:

feeling_zen posted:

If you are comfortable with mounting hetrogenous file systems and think you can manage that using what backup disks you have after a failure on whatever NAS is used that is fine (and certainly, most Linux boxes can mount most file systems). But, if this starts sounding a bit of a "you what and you what?" type of sceanrio, then an external drive where the backup is not of the volume but of the files (so the volume type of filesystem are not relevent) is far simpler. That means again, something like a USB drive with differential file backup to a disk that is something simple and easily understood by many systems... FAT32 or UFS for example.

You can then be pretty sure that if the moon explodes and your NAS dies and you loose everything, then a new NAS will almost definately understand the data on the USB drive and, as some have mentioned, if it doesn't support USB storage, you can always plug the drive into your Mac/PC and drag the files over to the new NAS. Remember, for the backup to be as resilient as possible it needs to be as universal as possible. If you're not completely comfortable with handling filesystems, then FAT, FAT32 or UFS are probably the way to go for the offline backup.

What you don't want is being stuck with backup data intact but struggling to find a new NAS or a system that can extract it.

My NAS can backup over USB to a FAT32 formatted drive, but it's not that difficult to tell OSX how to read/write to ext4. What I still need to find out, is whether what's on the back-up disc, is actually intelligible to OSX when directly mounted. Should know by tomorrow.

This shows that when it comes to backing up data, a PC is insanely better than an apple.

 I run W10 on a SSD hard drive but have 2 conventional drives for data storage. The conventional drives used to reside in an old XP computer, when I built my new computer they simply plugged and played, with my music and photo data available immediately.

 In fact you don’t actually need a USB drive for backups, simply stick a conventional sata drive in the PC, back it up and remove it. That’s what I used to do before I got a NAS. It’s a lot quicker than using USB.

fatcat posted:

EJS posted:

feeling_zen posted:

If you are comfortable with mounting hetrogenous file systems and think you can manage that using what backup disks you have after a failure on whatever NAS is used that is fine (and certainly, most Linux boxes can mount most file systems). But, if this starts sounding a bit of a "you what and you what?" type of sceanrio, then an external drive where the backup is not of the volume but of the files (so the volume type of filesystem are not relevent) is far simpler. That means again, something like a USB drive with differential file backup to a disk that is something simple and easily understood by many systems... FAT32 or UFS for example.

You can then be pretty sure that if the moon explodes and your NAS dies and you loose everything, then a new NAS will almost definately understand the data on the USB drive and, as some have mentioned, if it doesn't support USB storage, you can always plug the drive into your Mac/PC and drag the files over to the new NAS. Remember, for the backup to be as resilient as possible it needs to be as universal as possible. If you're not completely comfortable with handling filesystems, then FAT, FAT32 or UFS are probably the way to go for the offline backup.

What you don't want is being stuck with backup data intact but struggling to find a new NAS or a system that can extract it.

My NAS can backup over USB to a FAT32 formatted drive, but it's not that difficult to tell OSX how to read/write to ext4. What I still need to find out, is whether what's on the back-up disc, is actually intelligible to OSX when directly mounted. Should know by tomorrow.

This shows that when it comes to backing up data, a PC is insanely better than an apple.

 I run W10 on a SSD hard drive but have 2 conventional drives for data storage. The conventional drives used to reside in an old XP computer, when I built my new computer they simply plugged and played, with my music and photo data available immediately.

 In fact you don’t actually need a USB drive for backups, simply stick a conventional sata drive in the PC, back it up and remove it. That’s what I used to do before I got a NAS. It’s a lot quicker than using USB.

Well, sticking a hard drive into a macbook pro is a bit of a squeeze so I'm tied to thunderbolt or USB... but in terms of backing up data, my experience is that with OSX and Timemachine and programs like Carbon Copy Cloner, backing up doesn't get any more fluid. OSX reads just about any file format, just sadly no linux ext2/3/4.

It's when you have to use external discs to supplement internal storage, all of which needs backing up, that the logistics become complex - no matter what OS. That's where I'm hoping a NAS comes in useful - the first two days have been OK.

Sticking a hard disk into a Macbook is easy, you just need a big enough hammer! 

Huge posted:

Sticking a hard disk into a Macbook is easy, you just need a big enough hammer! 

In my last macbook, I had replaced the optical drive with an extra hard drive - it's still running at my folks' place. But the newer ones are closed tight - no drive swapping, memory expansion, or battery replacement... Still reliable machines, though.

Oooh, I've never come across one of those. How hard is an extra hard drive?