The protection of digital assets is a multi-million dollar industry. Whether we're talking about military, financial or scientific data, each indus...
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"And we stored the NAS in a box next to a speaker with a huge magnet for a month. And two drives failed."
I promise you, that's not what killed your hard drives. :)
It is many times more likely that them just sitting in storage, after presumably running 24/7 for years, is what did them in. Magnets don't "kill" hard drives; at worst they'd wipe the data (which never happens with home/speaker magnets), not wreck the drive itself.
Anyway, good to see someone spreading the word of "an external drive is not a backup for you photos", and providing some useful info/ideas!
Ok, one last thing: "RAID is not a backup". RAID is for uptime, not backup. :)
Interesting. I never suspected the fact that just storing the hard drives could have caused that failure. I'm still suspecting the magnet in the speaker because I had faulty sectors before the drives gave way.
Ha, we'll never know. :)
And thanks for pointing that out: RAID is not a backup. That should be said over and over again.
Now the vibrations from the speaker could def bork a drive or two. Some of the drives aggressive head parking along with some vibrations :D. Did you get smart output from the drives?
Great article. Consumer-level backup strategies are one of those things that you don't know you got wrong until you got it wrong!
I also have multiple layers in my system. The core is a five-disk RAID10 array (striped and mirrored with a hot swap disk) made up of WD Red disks. On top of this is an instance of Seafile, an open-source cloud implementation that I've been using for several years now. What I like about using a cloud approach is that any machine that is syncing to the cloud also stores files locally, so if the cloud goes down the local files are still viable. It also is a versioning system, so I can retrieve a file from any time in the past if necessary.
The Seafile cloud is exposed to the internet, so all of my files are available whether I or anyone in the family is at home, in the office, or traveling. I have zero trust in commercial cloud providers, so I'm basically creating my own service. Nothing is stored outside my control.
The Seafile server is backed up nightly via rsync to a second NAS that is simply mirrored. I built both of these machines, so they are easy to fix if something goes wrong.
Great article, I've learnt the hard way myself so I feel your pain over the data loss.
One thing I'd add to your thorough write up is to consider the disks you put into any RAID machine. I've had a pair of Seagate disks bought together fail within hours of each other (after several years of identical use) . If they'd both been in a RAID 5 set I would have lost everything before the array rebuilt after the first failure.
Now I aim to source disks separately so they come from different manufacturing batches (and even go for different makes of disk if the array allows)
This is a GREAT tip. I'll definitely take that into account when I upgrade the disks to WD Red :)
Great article, my backup strategy is very similar to yours, except that am using Synology Hyperbackup for the Synology->USB disk backup. I hadn't considered the proprietary aspect of this app, however I believe that if you specify the single-version task, a straight 1:1 copy of the source files is made, in a non-proprietary format.
Yeah to be honest, after using this setup for quite a while now, I'm less concerned about the "proprietary" aspect of Synology C2. I'm fairly confident that I'll be able to retrieve my data in case of emergency. The system has been flawless so far. Fingers crossed! :)
I wasn't aware of Synology S2 until I read your article. I checked a simple text file backed with Hyperbackup (single-version mode), and it wasn't altered in any way.
Thank you for this article. Was really very helpful. Still, I don't get why you don't run automatic backups? I have took a look to SyncBack software and I saw it support scheduled backups. Why you don't configure it?
Hey thanks a lot for your comment and for taking the time to read my article. :)
To answer your question: I'm not using scheduled backups with SyncBack because the hard drive I'm using as a backup is not stored in my house. In order to still have acces to my data in the event of a site failure (flood, fire, theft...) it is stored offline and off-site.
I am using scheduled backups thanks to Synology's C2 cloud service though. Everything is backed up automatically on Synology's cloud every week.
Thank you for your insight.
I'm building my system now so.. I think I have good ideas here. Thanks!
Different approach:
Main NAS (location A) with 4x3TB WD Red NAS in a MicroServer Gen8 8GB RAM ECC with FreeNAS(raidz2) network bonded. APC 1500VA connected and auto poweroff when no battery at all.
Secondary NAS with MicroServer Gen8 and old 4x2TB WD/Seagate disks with FreeNAS(raidz2) and network bonded. APC 1500VA with auto poweroff.
Periodic snapshot of important files in location A that are synchronized nightly to location B vía vpn connection.
Small (and old, but brand new after a warranty replacement) LTO3 External SAS Ultrium Unit connected to the FreeNAS in B location, daily basics backup of this snapshots for out of office backup strategy in LTO Cartridges.
No Cloud sync at all, for the moment.
Thanks for share!
;)
Javier.
Oooh that MicroServer is one sexy box! The problem I had with FreeNAS is that it's a software RAID, and at the time it was not without its flaws.
Sorry for the bad news today but Synology is not HW Raid neither.
FreeNAS use the disks in JBOD mode, directly attached to the system, the same way Synology does but with ZFS vs EXT4 in Synology Hybrid RAID.
If you get a shell into your NAS you'll see the mdX devices created by Synology when setup the raid 1 with mdadm (software raid).
The advantages using FreeNAS are the use of ZFS and all the stuff behind this file system, snapshot, replication, etc.
I move from my old setup (DS508 + DS413j) to FreeNAS thanks to ZFS.
The synology web interface and all the apps into the ecosystem are the best value of this solution, but I'm still prefer ugly interface but a lot of more control to what's happen with my data and disks.
J.
You're totally right in that regard, and I suspected it was not HW RAID (maybe their top of the line products are, I don't know). But at the end of the day, I'd rather rely on a product from a company that is specialized in such solutions than my own skill which have proven not to be that reliable. :D
If I ever try again the DYI approach, I'm more interested in products like unRAID which seem really solid.
Thanks for your feedback!
Of course, the flip side to this is there are now four places your data can be stolen from :)
Very informative post. I have a friend who works with video and should probably set up a proper NAS, or at least upgrade from "copy everything important to a thumb drive once in a while" so this is helpful.
Thanks for your reply!
It's true security can be a problem for some. Then again I guess the last paragraph can apply to the security of your data as well. It's about how confident you feel.
That's the reason I encrypt the data I'm sending to C2 with AES-256. As for the other backups, I could use a Truecrypt container to be extra safe.
Your friend already has a backup strategy which is simple, it's still better than what I had with my old setup. He just needs to add a bit of redundancy to be extra safe. :)
To help automate your tasks, I would highly suggest use rsync. I use rsync to connect to several of my machines via SFTP (secure with private keys) and sync my backups in multiple places. With the Synology Task Scheduler (similar to cron jobs) I run rsync on a schedule to automate my backups. Once you have the SFTP SSH access setup its super easy to just use a script under task scheduler.
Why WD green and not red?
Simply because at the time I was not aware of these drives (they came out a year prior to when I got the NAS), so I was a bit clueless about what to get. I just had a good experience with WD as a brand and went with what I knew. ;)