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We've photos, vids, music and other files across all manner of external HDD's, drives pulled from shuttles, an old Dlink dns-323 thats been retired with with a failing drive, google photos, dropbox etc. Aside from whats on google photos and docs in dropbox, if the house burns, we'd loose most of it.
I'd really like to put everything together in a single place , not necessarily looking for another NAS solution as its not really stuff we need to stream through the house or remotely but I would like at least some layer of raid1 redundancy or even the ability to pull a drive and stick it in the banks safe deposit box or fireproof box at home.
I see some 2bay drive enclosures will run in raid1 but cheaper nas (buffalo 220) aren't much more expensive.
I doubt at this point we have more than 1tb of data but that could grow pretty quickly if we start backing up full res photos from our phones.
What solution should I look towards?
I think NAS is what you are asking for. They work as file servers as well as everything else.
Cloud storage is an option too. Also you could have an off-site archive such as a friend or family member's house.
That's what I mainly use my NAS for TBH.
In a ideal world you would have three copies of any digital data.
The live data on the computer.
A local live copy nas and some syncing softwear would be good for this (as a Mac user I use time machine for this)
A offsite backup, cloud is great for this. Or you can use a second drive as above and swap them over weekly/monthly offsite (work locker, mates/mums house etc. Any that you store offsite should use encryption for security. And somewhere you will rotate them, if not stick with cloud based backups.
Restores, backups are worth sweet fa if you can’t restore from them when it hits the fan, so you need to do some test restores every month or two to ensure all is as expected.
The first thing I’d do is try and inventory the data and try and get it into a single location and then see which of the existing drives can be put into use as backup drives.
I belive true image will manage both “local” usb backups/sync and cloud backups among others. I’m sure there are other packages but haven’t used them.
I'm at the point where it's cloud for me, that is the single collection of everything, laptop and desktop have most of the same content between than, looped through rebuilds and new laptops with no problems. It's much easier on a fibre connection though.
I'm using Microsoft Onedrive. Everything stored on the PC to the Onedrive folder, which is synced automatically to the cloud, and then back to any device I want. With Office 365 you get more space then you'll ever need.
I also backup to a local drive and a second cloud storage for photos.
I’ve looked at a few physical back-ups but none give me the level of confidence I was hoping for.
So I’m using One Drive & Google Docs.
With Flickr’s 1k file limit coming in I’ve just emptied my Flickr account & put it all on Google.
One-Drive works seemlessly.
What @captmorgan said.
Also, RAID is not backup. With a RAID1 solution you've got redundancy so no downtime if you lose a drive, but there's plenty of other things that can go wrong with it.
I'm looking at changing what I use. Currently my laptop backs up to a NAS drive and also Carbonite cloud service. Laptop drive is nearly full and a lot of the time I use a Chromebook anyway.
It would make sense I think for me to use a NAS as the working files and back up to a USB drive plugged in to it and also mirror on Google Drive.
At least I think that would work?
Synology NAS here. I use that as working drive and take occasional copies of key data (photos etc) to other devices. Synology NAS has been running for two years with a couple of WD 3tb red drives and it’s brilliant.
great info, thanks.
Need to bite the bullet and at least start consolidating the data....
On my Mac it’s backed up using timemachine to a Synology NAS.
Media is stored on my NAS with incremental backups to an external drive and also cloud using Amazon drive.
Photos are in iCloud but also get backed up to the NAS.
RAID is not backup indeed. Nor is sync. Ask someone who's accidentally deleted a file.
Although cloud platforms these days also archive, I believe. Do check though.
Although cloud platforms these days also archive,
A quick look in the Bin on my Google drive has files I deleted back as far as 2015.
But I'd plan on a nightly/weekly back up of a NAS on to an attached HDD. My current WD My Cloud does it nightly on to a USB drive plugged in to the back of it.
I think on One Drive it keeps a version history of each file.. from memory (mine).
OneDrive with 365 sub = 1TB of data, and they don't mess with your photos (unlike Google's "free" unlimited storage). Can store pretty much anything. I have music also, documents etc.
As for going over 1TB, the chances are what you actually need to back up is way under it. Even full res photos would have to be a hell of a lot to hit 1TB. Mine are phone pics plus loads of SLR raw pics plus edits and corresponding JPEGs. 125GB at present for about 35k of files. Videos on top but I don't back up the raw source files in the cloud at the moment, just the final edits or any clips I want to keep. Though I do back up the rest on my Synology NAS using Windows File History backup, so there's a version history there and integrated into Windows. The NAS is also backed up onto a USB drive every week.
I don't do a full backup of PCs as in all the OS, apps etc. Or rather occasionally I might do an image backup, but usually before doing a major change to the computer. These days the restore functions in Windows 10 negates the need. Applications might need reinstalling which can be a pain if a lot, though sometimes it's good to have a clear out. Backup important keys and installers though if not easily available.