AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

My entire (digital) life resides on a NAS drive that I installed earlier this year - all my music, photos, documents and so on. I *really* don't want to lose it!

Up until now, my backup strategy has been very simple: I have two discs installed in the NAS, running as identical mirrored copies of each other. Every couple of weeks or so, I pull one of the discs out and replace it with a third disc that I keep safely offline. The pulled disc, of course, contains an up-to-the-minute copy of everything, and the NAS automatically syncs the newly inserted disc with the one that's left plugged in. So, I have redundancy in case of drive failure, and if the NAS itself blows up there's still the disc in the cupboard.

So far, so good. But there's a problem.

I discovered yesterday that a 'glitch' had managed to wipe out some of my music - I don't know how, and that's scary enough. But, given that I didn't notice for a while and had performed a disc swap since the data went missing, my backup disc didn't have it on either.

Oops

So, it looks as though my problem is that I don't have backups that are old enough. I need one that's intentionally out of date - so...

Today I went out and bought two large capacity USB drives. The plan is that, once a month or so, I'll back up the entire contents of the NAS to one of these drives, then take the drive offsite. I then bring home the other drive, and keep it in a cupboard ready for the next backup.

That way I always have a backup less than a month old offsite, and another which is 1-2 months old at home - old enough, in this case, that my missing music should still have been on it. I can also permanently install the third disc in the NAS and reconfigure it as RAID 5 to get some extra capacity, now I don't need it as a regular backup.

The only potential issue I can see now is that recently added files aren't protected from NAS failure until the time comes for an offsite backup - I guess a temporary copy on a local drive of anything important would fix that.

Any sysadmin types care to comment or make suggestions?

mike1210

Can you use incremental backups on the NAS backup software (IIRC you got an infrant technologies NAS sever?)

That way you could run weely backups, or even daily if need be

RAID 5 would be a good move also

With my external Lacie I run incrementals every week, then a full backup every month, drive is disconnected as soon as backup completes, with the 2 external drives you could have

1) Fulll backup > Inc > Inc > Inc....end of the month take offsite

2) Full Backup > Inc > Inc > Inc end of month take offsite, back to drive 1

all depends on the size of drives, how often changes are made etc, the drives may allow backups to over a few months even, depends how you are backing up I suppose

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

Thanks for the suggestions Mike - appreciate your time

I do have a ReadyNAS NV+, which has turned out to be a very flexible and capable piece of kit, though not perhaps quite as reliable as I might have hoped for this type of equipment, and its CPU is painfully slow.

My RAID drives are 320GB each and the USB drives are both 500GB. I have nearly 300GB of data, so once I've put all 3 discs into the NAS I'll have plenty of capacity. It does, however, take a bloody long time to back up over a USB2 link!

I like your strategy, though, but I think I need 3 USB discs to make it work:

- one which is updated regularly, to guard against virus infection, NAS failure or those "oh, sh*t" moments when you realise you've saved one file on top of another.

- after that drive has been in situ for a month, take it offsite. This disc becomes insurance against fire & theft - the data on it is between 1 day and 1 month old.

- after another month, bring that disc back home and keep it in a cupboard; the data on it is now between 1 and 2 months old, insurance against "WTF happened to..." failures like the one I've just had.

Now I just have to hope I don't outgrow a 500GB disc