What’s your backup plan?

[W9TR]

Originally Posted by Yamaki

I have a Synology 4 bay NAS with a 4TB SSD in each bay.

Bay 2 backs up Bay 1, Bay 3 backs up Bay 2 and Bay 4 backs up Bay 3. So what sort of redundancy is that?

That's OK unless the Synology goes Tango Uniform. Then you are into a recovery situation. I'm not sure what happens after that. Can you mount your drives into a new Synology without it reformatting them?

[W9TR]

Originally Posted by nicoff

I am using MSOne Drive. I get 1TB for free included with Office 365 so it is a bundled price. You can pay for extra storage.

Google Drive and Dropbox are other options for cloud storage.

The thing with the NAS is that typically all hard drives are the same age when you first install the NAS. I had one drive fail and when I replaced it I noticed that all other drives were in bad shape (the NAS can tell you the condition of each drive). When one replaces a damaged drive, it can take many hours (days?) for the NAS to get back to normal. That means that during that process all drives will be working overtime shuffling data around. And that is a dangerous time for another drive to fail.

I also have an MS Office Subscription for my consulting business. I'll check into additional storage cost. I've spent much more on media than equipment in the last 4 years so I've got about 10 TB of files now.

I purchased my drives from different sources to get different date codes, which I think helps. I had one WD Red 8TB show some bad sectors on initialization and that drive eventually failed. It took abut 16 hours for the NAS to recover after I mounted a new drive. Since my Synology NAS allows hot swapping, it was a breeze to replace the bad drive.

[W9TR]

Originally Posted by Kal Rubinson

I have a NAS with RAID5 48Tb capacity at the moment. It is mirrored in a similar NAS nearby and another one at a remote site.

Kal, that may be the gold standard with two backups. I'd like to do that as well, but our Wisconsin home has no persistent internet so I'd have to find a friend willing to host a remote site.

[clpetersen]

I use a combination of technology and old fashioned 'sneaker-ware'

Technology: A basic NAS (Synology) with high quality traditional spinning drives (note: SSD drive reliability varies very widely - the high reliability SSD's are very expensive)

Sneaker-ware: the NAS back-ups to a separate USB drive (also spinning type), several time a week. I have two copies - one at home and one at the office. I cycle these about every two weeks or so. And one at the lake-house, updated yearly.

[Yamaki]

Originally Posted by W9TR

That's OK unless the Synology goes Tango Uniform. Then you are into a recovery situation. I'm not sure what happens after that. Can you mount your drives into a new Synology without it reformatting them?

That's a good point. I'll have to check. I can "hot swap" a new drive in for a failed drive and access it to bring it online without shutting down the NAS.

Maybe I need one more backup for the NAS in its entirety.

[W9TR]

Hi Michael,
I have a Synology 1819+ 8 bay NAS and can hot swap drives, which is really convenient. I researched the case where the NAS itself fails. It looks like you can physically migrate your drives to a similar model Synology NAS with a bunch of caveats regarding compatibility. So that's good news from my perspective.
Tom

[PeterMusic]

I have a couple of spare SSDs that each have a relatively recent backup. One of these is offsite.

Dropbox was a disaster for me--I advise all to steer clear. It took close to a week to back up a small (by this group's standards) library of 1000 or so albums. Worse, it lost a bunch of stuff in the transition, so it was basically worthless. If memory serves, it was also running an awful lot in the background. Experiment ended less than a day after transfer was "complete".

[Weirdcuba]

I use both backblaze and amazon drive for cloud back up. Works a charm (and amazon stores all of your jpeg files for free if you are a prime member). I hated dropbox, which seemed to function for the purpose of selling me more stuff rather than just storing my data.

[Weirdcuba]

But, copying to the cloud does take some time. I spent about a month on it.

[W9TR]

Originally Posted by Weirdcuba

But, copying to the cloud does take some time. I spent about a month on it.

Our internet upload speed is so slow I calculated that it would take 231 days to upload my contents to a cloud service.