Question Outside of raiding hard drives, what is the best system for protecting content saved hard drives?

[Siddhartha]

I have had a number of hard drives fail and have lost a lot of content. What is the best way, besides raiding hds, to prevent losing hard drive stored data? I was thinking about backing up everything on a separate system dedicated for that purpose. But that feels a lot like playing hard drive failure roulette with double the fun.

 

[razel]

I don't think RAIDing HDDs is a good backup solution for the general consumer. It is a solution for enterprises and small office business. I've just been using two external USB HDDs and treating them like rotating archives. Two backups of all systems twice a year. Label one Jan, the other Jun.

However, things/times have changed. Most of the coveted memories are now on smartphones and often up on cloud. Regardless, I still do have two USB HDDs regularly replaced as soon as their warranties expire. Recently Seagate 5TB Backup Plus portable was only $87. Cheap insurance to avoid losing digital memories.

 

[ArisVer]

At least two backups.

A second computer, a NAS, external drives, cloud. Any other options maybe?

 

[bigboxes]

RAID is not backup. Never was and never will be. Businesses do not use RAID for backup. It's for uptime and performance.

If you want to backup your hard drives, have your data in more than one place. Preferably two places. If your backup fails then you have lost your data. Ideally, you have a copy offsite to protect from fire/flood/theft.

 

[Ratman6161]

Cloud backup. I use Carbonite but there are many options. Don't forget your backup is not just to protect against drive failures. Its a security precautions as well.

Its not free but any thing worth having is worth protecting.

 

[aigomorla]

Raid is fault protection not backup.
Backup means something u saved incase something fails.
Fault protection means just that, its protection against faults and hardware failure.

How important is the data? Most people use cloud as backup, which they are basically enterprise level fault protection vaults.

I personally use a RAID-Z2, which allows me to have 2 drives fail before it gets really dangerous. (fault protection)
The Odds of 2 drives failing before a resilver can be done are slim, unless someone decided to physically take a hammer to my server.
Then the really important stuff is backup'd and goes on a USB HDD, and is taken to the office.

NAS's are really good at fault protection, but it shouldn't be the only form of backup if the data is important.

Taking a external mirrored USB drive, backing up all that you need, and then shelving it somewhere safe with power off, can be a cheap viable solution if you do not want to cloud.

 

[Soulkeeper]

I keep two identical drives and do periodic rsync backups about once a week.
The same thing can be done with an external drive.
I like this method because it's like a checkpoint. Once I commit anything meaningfull I do the backup, there is no point in realtime mirroring for me.

 

[Jeff7181]

I used to use a cloud backup service that recently claimed I was violating their Terms of Service... they sold an "Unlimited" plan to me about 5 years ago and now they claim my 12TB of data is causing performance issues for other users, so I can drop down to their 5TB plan or get a refund. I got a refund... now I'm looking into building a small NAS to host my own backups. Sucks that they won't be offsite so in the event of a house fire or something I might lose both my primary data and backup... maybe someday I'll dump as much as I can onto a couple drives and leave them at a family member's house. Rotate them once a year or something with fresh backups...

Cloud backup is quite expensive... all my files are on my home server, which runs Ubuntu, so Backblaze, while affordable at $6/mo for unlimited storage, isn't an option since they only support Mac & Windows. The cheapest I can find is actually Backblaze B2, but that would end up costing me over $700 per year...

 

[Siddhartha]

I am in the process of backing up all of my content. What is the best way of storing these hard drives? In a cool dry place or plugged into my secondary system? The secondary system probably will not be running all the time like my primary system.

 

[Muadib]

I used to use a cloud backup service that recently claimed I was violating their Terms of Service... they sold an "Unlimited" plan to me about 5 years ago and now they claim my 12TB of data is causing performance issues for other users, so I can drop down to their 5TB plan or get a refund. I got a refund... now I'm looking into building a small NAS to host my own backups. Sucks that they won't be offsite so in the event of a house fire or something I might lose both my primary data and backup... maybe someday I'll dump as much as I can onto a couple drives and leave them at a family member's house. Rotate them once a year or something with fresh backups...

Cloud backup is quite expensive... all my files are on my home server, which runs Ubuntu, so Backblaze, while affordable at $6/mo for unlimited storage, isn't an option since they only support Mac & Windows. The cheapest I can find is actually Backblaze B2, but that would end up costing me over $700 per year...

I'm looking for a cloud backup for my NAS, and was told to checkout Backblaze. Yes, it's cheap if you're looking to backup a Windows or Mac pc, but anything else, forget it.

I am in the process of backing up all of my content. What is the best way of storing these hard drives? In a cool dry place or plugged into my secondary system? The secondary system probably will not be running all the time like my primary system.

The problem with using your backup pc is that it's still in the same house as your main pc. You still need an off site solution as well. I used to take my backup drives to work, and kept them in a filing cabinet.

 

[Fallen Kell]

I'm looking for a cloud backup for my NAS, and was told to checkout Backblaze. Yes, it's cheap if you're looking to backup a Windows or Mac pc, but anything else, forget it.

The problem with using your backup pc is that it's still in the same house as your main pc. You still need an off site solution as well. I used to take my backup drives to work, and kept them in a filing cabinet.

I found for the most critical things a USB thumb stick with high level self encryption is the way to go. You simply keep it with you or put it in a bank safe deposit box (you can also do the same with a full backup on external disks with the bank). You will be surprised that most important things can be culled down to fit in 100-200 gig, and as stated, the safe deposit box is probably something you should already have for items such as deeds/contracts/proof of ownership/will).

 

[Muadib]

I found for the most critical things a USB thumb stick with high level self encryption is the way to go. You simply keep it with you or put it in a bank safe deposit box (you can also do the same with a full backup on external disks with the bank). You will be surprised that most important things can be culled down to fit in 100-200 gig, and as stated, the safe deposit box is probably something you should already have for items such as deeds/contracts/proof of ownership/will).

I don't think that a thumb drive would work for me, as I've had too many go bad. I like the safe deposit box idea though.