I have a nas with 2x10tb drives. I mostly just have music, movies and tv shows on it.
People talk about raid not being a backup, but is that relevant for non-original data? I mean I can always get the media again if need be. It would just be an inconvenience.
What would you do?
It might be worth keeping a text file log of what’s on there at least.
Music is almost by-far the easiest to “restore”. In the event you lose everything and don’t want to spend time restoring it all, you can fling money at Spotify/etc and use a service that automagically imports playlists.
The other stuff? That’s going to be insanely annoying to back up and insanely boring to rebuild if it’s a super-huge collection. Personally, if it’s something I think I’m going to watch in the future I’m buying the bluray/dvd and keeping it on the shelf (more-so for that it works as a conversation piece).
I only care to have a solid backup strategy of stuff where there is a 0.0% chance to rebuild like personal documents, photos, and videos.
Fortunately, since you “only” have 2 10TB drives (I’m assuming as a RAID1 array), consider this:
Generally speaking, this will give you at least 1 backup that’s no older than 12 months, and 1 backup that’s no older than 6 months. The only risky time where you’d lose a backup is when you’re replacing the oldest backup.
IMO this 6mo strategy is a fine compromise on cost, effort, and duration of loss of data but tweak as you see fit.
To extend on this: Anybody ever did a test recovery to see if the backups are ok and to dry-test their backup/restore strategy? I have to admit that until now I was too cheap to keep a spare drive array just for testing.
I had a similar idea of 2×12TN drives, with one at home and backed up to monthly, whilst the other being in a remote location and backed up to physically every quarter
Yeah, and your way can give you a free off-site backup.
I guess if you really wanted to optimize to minimize the number of backups to take, you could just take one of the drives to the offsite location as part of the rotation.
Say if you have 3 drives, you’d always keep your second oldest copy off-site. You want your most recent backup on-site for convenience of restoration, and you want your oldest on-site to use to take a backup without driving to your buddy’s place first.
Let’s say your drives backup schedule is quarterly and with 3 drives, and the backup dates are: Drive A: Jan 2023, Drive B: April 2023, Drive C: July 2023
Now it’s October. Use Drive A for your backup since it is the oldest. Now Drive B becomes your oldest
Take Drive C, the now-second-oldest, to your buddy off site.
Bring back Drive B from your buddy’s place since it used to be the second-oldest and is now the current oldest
When it’s time to rotate the drives for backups, do a backup to the oldest drive first.
Take , do your backup to your oldest drive locally first, then drive offsite to drop off your now-formerly-newest drive, and bring back the off-site drive as the oldest.
That’s a decent idea. I was planning to keep one off-site backup on the same drive in perpetuity, but this might be better in the long-run. Do you think I should maintain a staggered back-up strategy or keep both backups in sync (by backing them up together at the same time)? What would be the demerit of this method?
Honestly I’m just super lazy and a bit ADHD. The more work a chore requires, the less likely I’m going to actually do it, so it’s just a personal hack.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with any approach as long as you can commit to doing it. It’s just a matter of finding something that you’re able to stick with. Maintaining cold backups is annoying lol
I am too, but on the other hand I’m also paranoid haha