Belt and Braces backups

My strategy is to run two single drive NAS/servers, a Unitiserve and a Synology, with the US automatic backup running. I don't really understand the logic of using RAID with discs in the same enclosure, as flood, fire, theft, hardware failure etc. wouldn't be covered in terms of getting you up and running again instantly. I have Minimserver running on the Synology, so I can already play the backup files now, giving both backup and a RAID type solution should the US ever become...er...US, so to speak!

Then I have an offsite backup taken from the Synology to a USB drive. I might also look at a cloud backup when/if Open Reach ever get round to fulfilling their promise to give us FTTP. 

We all dream of FTTP and synchronous 1gbps internet.  Not sure when that will come.  The long back up will only have to be done once, then it's just changes that are managed. 

My setup is with a 2 bay Synology in RAID-1,  this is simple disk mirroring.  Whilst I appreciate flood fire & theft is not covered,  the most likely failure is for one HDD to degrade and/or fail.  RAID-1 allows the bad disk to be replaced & copy over with a simple procedure.   Synology send me a monthly heath check by e-mail & I would get the same if a disk started to get errors.      I back up every few weeks,  new bought downloads is the usual trigger, to a USB drive that I keep unattached in my fire safe. 

Hi Parlow,

Similarly, I have an 8-bay NAS and a script runs nightly copying any file changes to an attached USB drive - which when full goes to a nearby friend.

WRT Glacier - have you tried a restore from there? What is the speed? Are there any hidden costs wrt download?

Cheers,

M

I have one backup disc in my ns01,  a raid0 nas. 2 usb disks, one at home and the other at work. Unfortunnately backup is done manually but it is better than nothing. Glacier sounds interesting but of course the price is the interesting thing here.

Claus  

I've moved away from a HDX to a NDX/NAS setup. There are 2 NASes, one is a single CPU one bay 4TB Synology 115j which acts as the house NAS, rips from a PC running dbPoweramp go to the music folder on there. This rsyncs to a Synology 216j which runs 2 * 4TB drives in RAID (the RAID is not really needed, but having bought the 2 bay for the extra CPU power, I thought I might as well use the second bay and have a hotter swap capability.) The 216j acts as the main server for the NDX and Qbs, with the house NAS providing a backup.

Backups are done by attaching a 4TB USB drive to the house NAS and doing a straight file copy, I found the Synology incremental backup far too unwieldy and slow for initialising, the 1st backup of a bit over 1TB was scheduled to take 7 days and locked up the NAS long before that. So now I just do a file copy which takes a few hours when I'm working at home. The USB drives are stored at my other house.

Mr Underhill,

I'm new to Glacier so I haven't tried to restore.  It's not meant to be instant access, so the SLA for restores is measured in days, but it's meant for catastrophic loss recovery. I've nearly 0.5TB of music and photos that I'd hate to lose.  According to the AWS dashboard it'll cost about £8 a month.  As for uploads I'm limited by asynchronous broadband, but you put it on and leave it.  I've another 3TB of video I'd like to upload but that'll take months to upload. 

Hi Parlow,

I have had to restore from my USB drives once, that was a pain but doable. I like the theory of the slow storage, just a bit suspicious of trying to use it in a real world scenario.

If you do try and restore from there I would be very interested in what you find.

Thx,

M

Are you really, really sure  you are covered? 

What happens if you accidentally delete a file, but don't become aware of that for a while - not until  after you have done several more USB and cloud backups?

Will it also then have disappeared from your USB/cloud backup? Or have you got a backup strategy with file versioning, so you can recover earlier versions or deleted files?

I know that the Core can be backed up directly to USB drive as an alternative to NAS as required by my Unitiserve. When I buy a Core will I be able to automatically update 2 USB drives atlernately as I would like to keep 1 at a friends house and 1 plugged in to the Core, and swap them over every  few weeks.  Or would it be a manual process?

Dave

Parlow posted:

My music library is running on a 4 drive RAID 5 NAS with an off site USB drive copy in my sister's garage.  The NAS has completed a backup cycle to Amazon Glacier (duration 1.5 weeks).  I think I'm now covered.

Parlow: the limit of my tech saviness is rsync commands in terminal to backup various data to external drives. Is AWS Glacier's command line complicated to use?

Has anyone else tried iBroadcast, it appears to offer free cloud backup and allow you to play your files on various devices.

Uploading my library took just over a week but so far seems to work really well.