I need to consolidate my hard drives (getting old) and need a backup solution

[Nvidiaguy07]

So I've been lucky for some time now.

I have never had a hard drive fail on me that ever had any important information on it. My current setup is kind of asking for trouble though.

This is my current situation:

**System Drive - 256GB Samsung SSD - 2 years old - only used for the OS, programs, and a few games. Obviously not a problem. **

-----The rest on this list are all storage drives-----
5 year old 1TB WD black internal drive. Used as "temporary storage". So new downloads of movies, tv shows, special movies etc go here first. From here I send them somewhere else if its something I want to keep. I also use this to keep home movies and recorded stuff before I edit it and send it somewhere else. Usually is about 50-60% full. I torrent a lot into this drive - not sure if that wears a drive down faster.

2.5 year old 2TB WD black internal drive. This is my main "sort of important" storage drive. I keep my local dropbox / google drive folders here - not that it matters because theyre backed up anyway. My main steam folder is here with most of my games installed. Any home movies are here (they are ripped off DVD so theyre also somewhere else). Downloads Ive saved. apk and apps I need. Roms saved (some pretty rare). And really old documents which I kinda should keep but if I lost them really wouldnt care all that much. (I personally would prefer to just burn these to a DVD and just store somewhere instead of them taking up space on my hard drive - but I know DVD's break down). Drive is 40% full, but it could be much less since I dont care about 95% of the games installed. ***This is the only drive that I would like to really backup*** not even the whole drive, but there is about 100-200GB of stuff that Id be pretty bummed if I lost.

5 year old 1.5TB WD elements external drive. USB 2.0 - Stored TV shows, movies, Documentaries, etc. 80% full

4 year old 2TB Fantom external drive. USB 2.0 - Same as above. 35% full

4 year old 500GB WD passport external. - usb powered. usb 2.0. Currently empty, but I use it to temporarily save peoples stuff when fixing their computers.

4 year old 750GB WD passport external. - usb powered. usb 3.0. I have a bunch of saved UFC and Pride events saved on it. Really dont care about if I lost it or not.

So as you can see my drives are aging and thought most of my stuff saved isn't irreplaceable - it would suck if i were to lose it.

If I were made of money - I would just replace all of my drives besides my SSD. My setup would be.

256GB SSD system drive
1-2TB Temporary Storage Drive
2TB Steam / Storage drive (some important things on this drive)
5TB TV / Movie Drive


So my question comes down to: which drives should I replace? Am I better off just using one to backup another? How long do DVD backups last? Is there a way to test which hard drives are on their way out? (I know about drive fitness test - but not sure if thats just for failing drives).

Sorry if my post is kinda all over the place, but im just not really sure which direction I should go.

EDIT: and one more question - does how much the drive has been used wear it more? Both of those External drives with TV shows and movies arent really used all that much except for watching stuff once in a while - no torrenting, gaming, or programs running from these drives, and they both are "green" and pretty much turn off when not in use.

EDIT 2: Do unused blank DVDs go bad? I bought a ton of DVDs and Dual Layer DVDs that I havent used. Probably over 5 years old. Keep or toss? And if keep - are they ok to store some stuff on?

 

[Data-Medics]

Optical media such as DVDs are very unreliable, and will take you forever to burn anyway. I would personally purchase a good NAS with 4+ drive bays, load it up with a few large drives and consolidate everything in there.

I'm actually doing some of that now with a stack of drives from old laptops/desktops onto my new Synology DS1813+

 

[KingFatty]

You only have 100-200 GB worth of stuff you really need to protect, so I'd suggest backing it up redundantly on every drive that will fit it. The nice thing about that is if you accidentally delete something, or a virus or something wrecks some of the files, you will have multiple prior copies to rely on. As in, you can have a drive to use for backup that's 6 months old, one from 2 weeks, and one you backup daily. So if you mess up, you can have a historical set of copies to fall back on and dig-through across time.

 

[Charlie98]

Your situation is similar to mine, a 256GB SSD with all programs on it, a 2TB storage drive, a 1TB redundant storage drive, a 500GB USB3 portable (being phased out for a new 2TB USB3), and another 2TB USB3 portable (used in rotation... one week on, one week off.) I have a separate HTPC with my movies on it, but they are backed up on redundant HDDs, too.

Keeping your current SSD, I would use the 2TB Black as your temp storage drive, add a new 2-3TB drive as your Steam, etc drive, and get a 2-3TB external USB3 portable drive to make backups with (i.e. using something like Acronis to make a backup image of the OS to both the temp HDD and the portable HDD, and then a backup image of the Steam drive to the portable.) Add a 5TB HDD for your movies.

I personally don't like splitting my data up between drives, I would rather have everything on one disk, and then duplicating or imaging that data to another disk(s) as backup/redundancy; it is far easier to manage the drives and data on them. You could even nix the existing 2TB scratch disk if you replaced it with a single drive big enough to consolidate your scratch disk needs, your important files, Steam, with the understanding that you would need 2 such disks to provide a way to back up the data, and a suitable external portable HDD.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Crashplan and don't worry about it?

NAS?

 

[Nvidiaguy07]

Optical media such as DVDs are very unreliable, and will take you forever to burn anyway. I would personally purchase a good NAS with 4+ drive bays, load it up with a few large drives and consolidate everything in there.

I'm actually doing some of that now with a stack of drives from old laptops/desktops onto my new Synology DS1813+

I have never used or even looked into NAS before. Whats the point of using them? I dont understand why just the bays themselves are so expensive? If I had the space in my PC - wouldn't it make more sense just to add more hard drives and set them up in raid or whatever?

You only have 100-200 GB worth of stuff you really need to protect, so I'd suggest backing it up redundantly on every drive that will fit it. The nice thing about that is if you accidentally delete something, or a virus or something wrecks some of the files, you will have multiple prior copies to rely on. As in, you can have a drive to use for backup that's 6 months old, one from 2 weeks, and one you backup daily. So if you mess up, you can have a historical set of copies to fall back on and dig-through across time.

What program should I use for this? Does windows have a built in one? I have little knowledge about this stuff because I really just didnt care if I lost stuff in the past.

I know in disk management, I can set up mirroring there - is that the same as raid 1?

Your situation is similar to mine, a 256GB SSD with all programs on it, a 2TB storage drive, a 1TB redundant storage drive, a 500GB USB3 portable (being phased out for a new 2TB USB3), and another 2TB USB3 portable (used in rotation... one week on, one week off.) I have a separate HTPC with my movies on it, but they are backed up on redundant HDDs, too.

Keeping your current SSD, I would use the 2TB Black as your temp storage drive, add a new 2-3TB drive as your Steam, etc drive, and get a 2-3TB external USB3 portable drive to make backups with (i.e. using something like Acronis to make a backup image of the OS to both the temp HDD and the portable HDD, and then a backup image of the Steam drive to the portable.) Add a 5TB HDD for your movies.

I personally don't like splitting my data up between drives, I would rather have everything on one disk, and then duplicating or imaging that data to another disk(s) as backup/redundancy; it is far easier to manage the drives and data on them. You could even nix the existing 2TB scratch disk if you replaced it with a single drive big enough to consolidate your scratch disk needs, your important files, Steam, with the understanding that you would need 2 such disks to provide a way to back up the data, and a suitable external portable HDD.

I personally liked to split up my temp storage file and reg storage because I figured torrenting really wore the drive out. (is this true?) I could even see that if I were downloading a lot, accessing media on that drive was really slow - so that's why I have steam/important stuff on a separate drive.

I havent really looked much into backup software - but I think If I could incrementally backup whats on my storage hard drive then that should alleviate a lot of problems. So thinking about repurposing one of my media drives to make backups or my storage drive (not steam just the important stuff). Then I would also buy another huge external for TV shows and movies and stuff.

The only thing that wouldn't be backed up is all my TV shows and Movies - but im not even sure I should bother with it.

So I guess my only questions left are:

Whats the best backup software? If it open source and also available on linux? (i might be moving over, or at least dual booting again soon.

 

[Soulkeeper]

For me, the solution i've been relying on for years is a single big drive for everything (except boot/os), then I get an identical drive and do weekly backups to it (rsync), this saves only the changes and preserves ownership/permissions/etc. which I like.
A scratch drive could just as easily be a scratch dir, really no point in having an extra drive for that. Also I use a ram drive for temp stuff that I don't mind losing if the power goes out or I reboot.

You could also run raid1 or raid10 if you wanted.

 

[Charlie98]

I don't think writing torrents to disk wear it out any faster than anything else, but I see your point on disk access when it's writing. You have enough leftover drives you can easily use one of them as the scratch disk for that kind of stuff.

As an experiment, and because you have WD drives in your PC, you can download a free version of Acronis from the WD website and try it out. You can make backup images incrementally (which takes up less space over time) or full backups, which is what I do. I have had several occasions to use my backup images, in each instance it took about 20 minutes and I had my computer back. There is other backup software, I'm only familiar with Acronis and not had any need to look elsewhere; I don't know about a Linux version, but certainly there is something out there, probably open source.

You really need to decide what it is you want to back up, and what you don't. I still have all my source DVD's to the rips on my HTPC, for example, but I sure as shootin' don't want to go through and re-rip 500 disks because I lost my media drive... so I back it up. If I have data and files on my computer, they are worth backing up, or they wouldn't be there... but YMMV. It is far easier to designate a backup program if everything is on one disk (minus a separate OS drive, which can be a necessity in some cases.)

 

[Essence_of_War]

I have never used or even looked into NAS before. Whats the point of using them? I dont understand why just the bays themselves are so expensive? If I had the space in my PC - wouldn't it make more sense just to add more hard drives and set them up in raid or whatever?

When you're purchasing an N-empty-bay NAS device from some someone (QNAP, Seagate, WD, Synology...whoever) what you're paying for is 1) The hardware and 2) software configured to be a turn-key product.

If you want a hub to store your data on so it can be accessible from a number of client devices, they will do this very well.

What program should I use for this? Does windows have a built in one? I have little knowledge about this stuff because I really just didnt care if I lost stuff in the past.

I know in disk management, I can set up mirroring there - is that the same as raid 1?
...
I havent really looked much into backup software - but I think If I could incrementally backup whats on my storage hard drive then that should alleviate a lot of problems. So thinking about repurposing one of my media drives to make backups or my storage drive (not steam just the important stuff). Then I would also buy another huge external for TV shows and movies and stuff.

Windows has back-up/restore functionality. You can set it up from:
Control Panel\System and Security\Backup and Restore

There are other software that can do it for you though. Terabyte's Image for Linux/Windows is great for imaging drives (and it correctly handles SSDs) and it can handle incremental images. SyncBack is very nice also for backing up and synchronizing files to/from various volumes. The TBI/W is free-to-try, SyncBack has a free version for personal use, and more full-featured versions that you can try for free and purchase.

If you feel comfortable with linux, rsync can be pretty handy for this type of thing also, it is a very powerful tool. I use it to do pull-backups of my steam library, encoded media, etc and I'm quite happy with it.

 

[bigboxes]

I take my backups seriously. The thing is that I could do better. I've got unprotected thrash drives, too. I also need to back up my new OS drive. It's all about time and money... well, for me! :biggrin:

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I take my backups seriously. The thing is that I could do better. I've got unprotected thrash drives, too. I also need to back up my new OS drive. It's all about time and money... well, for me! :biggrin:

That just ain't right.

 

[nk215]

I would take the fantom external drive apart, mount the HDD in there internally and RAID 1 with the existing 2TB drive you have. Consolidate most of your data on it. Get another cheap 1 TB drive and RAID 1 that with your torrent drive.

that's basically how to keep my data, I RAID1 old drives to buy more response time. Since they are years apart and from different companies, they most likely won't fail at the same time.

 

[Cerb]

Optical media such as DVDs are very unreliable, and will take you forever to burn anyway. I would personally purchase a good NAS with 4+ drive bays, load it up with a few large drives and consolidate everything in there.

I'm actually doing some of that now with a stack of drives from old laptops/desktops onto my new Synology DS1813+

For small data sets (of today), I've never found that to be the case, with good media. I've yet to have a non-rebranded non-Chinese Sony, a TY, or a Verbatim Datalife Plus fail. Occasionally, I dig out and error-scan some, and while some have slightly degraded, nothing major. But, the data needs to be relatively small, and easy to break up.

With such small data, but big enough for HDDs, have it stored on a RAID 1 (mirror), then backed up periodically, and automatically. A turnkey NAS can do this, but if you are willing to put in the time, so can any PC, with Windows or Linux (though Windows may have some special caveats wrt software RAID support).

For software, there's tons. Personally use Syncback and Cobian, depending on needs.

 

[mikeymikec]

I use optical media for 'secondary backups', ie. I've got it backed up somewhere already (likely a HDD), and I want a second copy. Occasionally stuff I don't care much about just gets an optical backup.

What I'd really like are dual-layer DVDs that are as cheap as single layer ones, but I think DVD recordables will be as obsolete as CD recordables before that happens.

 

[bigboxes]

That just ain't right.

Wha??

But seriously, I stopped using optical media a long time ago. After finding out that many discs were unreadable after needing them for data restoration I stopped using them. Not to mention there are file name limitations that are so restrictive. As you can see, I've got my file server (and all of it's HDDs) and my closet shelf full of identical backups. I've started to work on getting a third set to store offsite. That is the goal, but this hobby is expensive and it's not the only priority in my life.

On a related note, I would not recommend the Vantec NexStar 6G enclosures. As you can see, I've used NexStar 3 enclosures for years. I thought the 6G enclosures were the next generation. Not really. They are cheaper quality than the NexStar 3 enclosures. Thinner metal, lots more plastic, tiny power cables, cheap switches... just say no to cheap crap. I will eventually get the NexStar 3 SuperSpeed enclosures that will handle 4TB+ drives and have USB3 and eSATA. Unfortunately, they are double the cost of the 6G enclosures. That's a premium when you still have to purchase the drive. However, I prefer the quality and reliability of the NexStar 3 enclosures to the cheap garbage that the HDD makers provide with their external HDDs.