Ask Slashdot: What's The Best Way To Backup Large Amounts Of Personal Data? (foxdeploy.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader has "approximately two terabytes of photos, currently sitting on two 4-terabyte 'Intel Rapid Storage' RAID 1 disks." But now they're considering three alternatives after moving to a new PC: a) Keep these exactly as they are... The current configuration is OK, but it's a pain if a RAID re-sync is needed as it takes a long time to check four terabytes.

b) Move to "Storage Spaces". I've not used Storage Spaces before, but reports seem to show it's good... It's a Good Thing that the disks are 100% identical and removable and readable separately. Downside? Unknown territory.

c) Break the RAID, and set up the second disk as a file-copied backup... [This] would lose a (small) amount of resilience, but wouldn't suffer from the RAID-sync issues, ideally a Mac-like "TimeMachine" backup would handle file histories.

Any recommendations?
This is also a good time to share your experiences with Storage Spaces, so leave your answers in the comments. What's the best way to backup large amounts of personal data?

Comments

Come the fuck on

[Anonymous Coward]

2 Terabytes is nothing.

Here's how you do this:

10 You buy an external hard disk that is 4 Terabytes or larger, and USB 3.0.
20 Copy the fucking files to that thing.

You're done. Now you have two copies: one on whatever bad idea you have as your main drive, and the other on a physically separate drive.

Not good enough? GOTO 10

Re:Come the fuck on

[spire3661]

You forgot checksumming and verification after transfer.....You have something on the other drive after the transfer, you wont know what until you verify it.

Re:Come the fuck on

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you serious? What a sloppy response. Relies on a manual process (therefore prone to human error, forgetting, inconsistent method of copying, etc). Doesn't scale if the RAID array grows larger than the biggest USB3 disk you can buy.

Re:Come the fuck on

[joe_frisch]

Agreed! The minor changes I would make (and do for my own few TB of files).

Have a script the runs the backup. I use rsync on linux.
Make two copies, one that mirrors, one that just adds files.
Use two backup disks, always have one at a remote location (your work) so you don't lose data in a house fire.

If it is a single command (my is "backup") then its easy to remember to do every week.

I actually have 3 backups. One at home. Two at different work sites that I cycle through. I do my backups from a linux machine that doesn't provide write access to my main windows machines. That makes me a little more resistant to hacks (since they would have to hack two different OSs.

Re:Come the fuck on

[Chelloveck]

What he said. And for ongoing backup, keep the disk at a buddy's house and rsync your files to them periodically. And reciprocate. Keep their backup disk at your place and let them rsync to you. Done. You're safe and you've made the world a better place.

Although I imagine that our "anonymous Slashdot reader" who asked this question wouldn't know rsync if it bit them on the ass, being the marketing person for Storage Spaces and all. Come on, the only purpose of such a fucking obvious question is to get some front-page name recognition for the product. Nice timing, too, slipping it onto the feed Sunday night, ready for everyone's Monday morning Slashdot-and-coffee ritual. Kudos.

RAID is not backup

[bad_fx]

Say with with me: "RAID is not backup!"

Re:RAID is not backup

[Frobnicator]

Say with with me: "RAID is not backup!"

Indeed. There is also a difference between backup and archive.

RAID = This is running live, and I need a duplicate that is instantly available so I can keep running in case one drive fails. The trick is that if there is an operation that destroys data (e.g. ransomware infection that encrypts your stuff) then you lose all disks. This is why RAID is not backup.

Backup = Just in case the machine dies, or I accidentally delete a bunch of stuff, or a virus hits, I can restore from the backup. This generally follows the 3-2-1 rule: At least three copies, at least two media, at least one off site. Businesses often use D2D2T systems for this.

Archive = I will probably never look at this again, but I absolutely need to keep a copy around for historic or business reasons. Think about services like Iron Mountain or Amazon Glacier. Tape archives that are quite cheap and almost certainly never reviewed again. This is along the lines of "show me the obituaries from a newspaper published 7 May 1957", or similar.

For the original story, it seems like he is looking for an archival solution rather than a backup solution.

RAID IS NOT BACKUP

[networkzombie]

1) RAID IS NOT BACKUP unless you have another read only set.
2) STORAGE SPACES IS NOT BACKUP unless you have another read only set, and please, it is JBOD with some added features.
3) You are exchanging RAID sync issues with backup sync issues.

I would setup hardware RAID, but that is not related to what you need... Backup to two other disks. Upgrade disk size and technology as needed. A 4TB disk is like $140

Re: Commit it to memory!

[techno_dan]

I found FreeNAS to be the best and cheapest solution. Was not that hard to set up, and like you said, snapshots are great.

Re:RAID is not backup...

[Jason Levine]

I'll second BackBlaze - but with the caveat of expecting your initial upload to take a long time depending on your Internet speeds. I have a 15/1 connection so the ~1TB that I wanted to back up took me about 8 months. (I couldn't use my full 1Mbps upstream bandwidth for backup traffic.) Now that this is done, however, it's pretty much automatic. New data gets written and the backup occurs. They even have an app you can use so you can access your data no matter where you are.

If you need to restore from backup, BackBlaze will ship you a thumb drive or external hard drive for a fee. The fee is refunded if you send the drive back (thus ensuring that people don't abuse this service) and it beats having to download TBs of data.

Besides BackBlaze, I back up everything on to two external hard drives. This way, if one drive blows, the other drive keeps the data safe. As another person posted, follow the 3-2-1 rule. 3 copies of the data (for me, 2 external HDs and 1 on BackBlaze), 2 different mediums (e.g. external HDD and cloud), and 1 copy offsite (e.g. BackBlaze or another cloud provider).