How do you Backup Your Raid Array?

I am interested in getting either a 6 or 8 bay raid setup running raid 5. My question is, how do raid users backup their raids?

ChadAndreo wrote in post #15828642
I am interested in getting either a 6 or 8 bay raid setup running raid 5. My question is, how do raid users backup their raids?

Unfortunately usually to another expensive RAID array... most places use a variation of the 3-2-1 backup rule: 3 copies to 2 separate locations, with 1 location offsite.

Option 1: Something cheap... several USB3 disk drives that you dump fulls and incrementals to daily. Quick, cheap, easy. Great for a home user. But if your livelihood depends on it option 2 below is much better...

Option 2: If you need a rock solid solution you could do a cascading backup where you mirror one array to another and then backup the mirror to several cheap 4TB USB3 external drives. Don't use just one external drive since they have a much shorter MTBF than modern disks in a RAID array.

So you run a full backup weekly to your second array, then do incrementals daily to that same array for those fulls, keep 2 fulls and all their incrementals on the 2nd array, once you get a third full backup and all of it's incrementals on the 2nd array then archive that third all of it's incrementals from the second array to two separate USB3 external disk drive devices. Then to free up space delete the 3rd full and all of it's incrementals that are on the second RAID array so you then only have two full backups and their incrementals still there. Then wash-rinse-repeat... This way if the week link fails (one of the 2 USB3 drives) you still have the everything on the other one.

If your external USB3 drives have the room I'd archive both the 2nd and 3rd fulls and all of their incrementals there too... That way if the 2nd RAID array fails you still have all your current data on the primary array, and the last two states of that array before it's current state. You could also dump the 2nd & 3rd's to a cloud solution for even more security but this is slow... it could take days or even weeks since you don't want to eat up all you network bandwidth while your working it needs to run when your not using the system. Clouds work better when you want to dump a large backup and the just store what changes. The first dump takes a long long long time but the incrementals are relatively quick unless your doing film editing or something like that creates huge daily changes...

Another thing you can do to save space is look for a backup application that supports "de-duping". Which basically deletes duplicate files and only saves one copy but creates a log that remembers where all copies of copies originally resided so the recovery app can put humpy-dumpty back together again if you have a failure.

I have a Synology 5 bay NAS running SHR which is their version of RAID 5. I attach a USB 3.0 hard drive and have it back up the most important files to it nightly. I also have CrashPlan installed on it so it backs up to their servers in Minnesota.

mike_d wrote in post #15828682
I have a Synology 5 bay NAS running SHR which is their version of RAID 5. I attach a USB 3.0 hard drive and have it back up the most important files to it nightly. I also have CrashPlan installed on it so it backs up to their servers in Minnesota.

How much do you have backed up to crashplan; and how often do you add more? I'm curious how much shooting I'd be able to keep up with; even though I have relatively good internet.. (35/25 fios)

I currently have all my exports online in a few places (Flickr, picassaweb), on a local drive; and all my raw's on my raid5 nas; but I haven't come up with a way to get the RAW's offsite...

w0m wrote in post #15828849
How much do you have backed up to crashplan; and how often do you add more? I'm curious how much shooting I'd be able to keep up with; even though I have relatively good internet.. (35/25 fios)

I currently have all my exports online in a few places (Flickr, picassaweb), on a local drive; and all my raw's on my raid5 nas; but I haven't come up with a way to get the RAW's offsite...

I have about 500 GB of stuff on CrashPlan. I'm not a pro shooter so I'm not adding huge amounts of stuff daily. My upload speed is only about 1.8 Mbit though.

BAJ2k pretty much nailed it down.....

The best way is to back it up to an identical RAID BOX.... That way if your original RAID BOX goes down (say a power supply or motherboard pops), then you can pull the drives and put them into the backup box and have exactly what you had before without using the "back up drives"....

If not, then BAJ2k pretty much has it down as how to back it up...

Personally I'd always keep some OLDER backups around... REASON.. Biggest problem seems to be user error... If you delete the 2009 photos directory, then "back up " (which backup wouldn't have the now deleted directory and deletes those files from the backup drive), it may be months before you realize they were gone.... Then the deletion is on all your backups....

We used to back up the lawfirm onto tape (which was pretty easy since it didn't have anywhere near the data we use now)....... There were a set of 12 tapes that were end of the month which we kept for a year and recycled. So you could go back to the end of any month and recover your data. Then there were "daily tapes" which were 3 months of 1 tape a day (60 tapes). You used new tape everyday and that way you could restore to a date that was within the last 3 months. Worked pretty well. At the end of the YEAR we did a tape of what was on the server on 12/31 and kept that one forever.

But then who uses tape now? Wow those tapes were stressed and moved fast, they used to come apart every once and a while too... To me they were not as really secure as having a lot of 2TB drives around (for the lawfirm that is).... For photos I have 3 20TB NAS drives, plus more to back them up onto.. Times change...

Mark H

I agree with Mark... it's hard to find decent "home" tape drives nowadays they're kind of past their home use prime. That being said whenever I design a high availability system for a customer I make sure that a copy of the weekly fulls go to tape and get sent to Iron Mountain for 7 years. Not really an option for home users but if you're a fairly successful photography company you can pick up some old tape drives fairly cheap and store your tapes in a safety deposit box at a bank. Much cheaper than Iron Mountain and when was the last time you heard of a bank vault being destroyed in a fire or other force majeure.

This unit is nice option... if you can afford $2k a lens you probably can afford $2k to backup all of your life's work. Quantum LTO-4 HH Tape Drive. Obviously this isn't for everyone but if you make your entire livelihood from shooting video or photo's it's an option you may want to consider. With this option you skip the USB3 drives and go from your 2nd array straight to LTO-4 and then save the tapes in a safe place offsite.

The files on the main computer are strictly separated into worthy things and things that have laxer backup requirements.

The good stuff gets pushed to a machine that does snapshots on a smaller array. Due to the amount of nonsense on the primary machine this lasts a long while.

Important things get pushed over the internet.

I have a Drobo with everything on it. Once a year I buy a cheap external drive to make an archive of the past years photos and leave it in a pelican box at my parent's. I also have my current work on dropbox. the best backup option for you is offsite