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Ask the Doctor

Terabyte Backup

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Ask the Doctor LogoHow do I, at a reasonable cost, back up all of my data? Long ago, when hard drives were 40GB, 4.7GB DVDs were a reasonable means of backup. But now with multi-terabyte hard drives there doesn’t seem to be any reasonable backup method. Right now I’m using RAID 5 rather than backing up my data. I have a RAID with five 1TB drives in it and I’m relying on the redundancy as the backup. I looked into tape backup drives and found that the cheapest 800GB LTO-4 drive was $1,800 and the tapes run $50 each. As it turns out, I could build another system, put together a duplicate array and back up one to the other for less than the cost of the tape drive. Is there any such thing as affordable backup anymore? I can’t find anything. Blu-ray isn’t even affordable yet, and it’s already too small for backups.

—K. Bateman
 
Ah, you’ve touched upon a common topic of discussion here at Maximum PC: How do you back up huge amounts of data effectively?
 
The bad news is, with the amounts of data you’re talking about, there’s no such thing as a cheap backup solution. If you want to back up 3TB of data, you’re going to have to spend some money. Sticking with what you have now may be tempting, but RAID 5 is not a backup strategy, and you’d have to buy at least one 1TB drive to rebuild your array if it fails, anyway. So here’s what the Doc recommends: Buy a multibay NAS (or external eSATA enclosure, such as WD’s MyBook Studio Edition II), fill it with 2TB drives and back up your array to it, or (if you have less than 3TB of data on your array) split your array up and use half for your primary drive and the other half for backup.
 
 
Western Digital's MyBook Studio II contains two 2TB drives and has an eSATA port. Not a bad choice for backing up huge amounts of data.
 
SUBMIT YOUR QUESTION Are flames shooting out of the back of your rig? First, grab a fire extinguisher and douse the flames. Once the pyrotechnic display has fizzled, email the doctor at doctor@maximumpc.com for advice on how to solve your technological woes.

 

COMMENTS:7
COMMENTS
avatarbackup

RAID 5 is not a backup system. & just copying your data to another system is not good enough. you need to have the ability to save version of your files & DB for has long as you can, that can amount to up to 50% more than your main aray data capacity.

I would sudjest building the cheepest system you can, with the bigest disk you can RAID with no redundancy what so ever & install a good backup software. you do not need redundancy or speed on a backup system.

the beauty of the thing is that the more often you check for changes the less the delta is & the less intrusive your backup is & the less quick it need to be! you can even put the old files versions (the realy important data) on an smaler mirrore array if that important to you.

 

ilan

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avatarRaid 5

I notice a lot of people preaching RAID 5...but in my opinion RAID 10 AKA RAID 1+0 is the best of both worlds for data backup...RAID 0 uses parity...RAID 5 uses redundancy... RAID 10 USES Redundancy and parity...ultimately though...I use offsite storage as my prefered backup strategy...from two different companies...because one comany I use is based in Cali...so they could get earthquaked/Mudslided?burned off the face of the earth...best of luck to all in you quest for affordable backup solutions...

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avatarAnother option

Not sure how you define affordable, but there are several online backup services that will back up nigh on limitless amounts of data for a very reasonable fee.  I just started using Backblaze after reading about their very cool storage server design.  For $5 a month or $50 per year I can backup unlimited data from any locally attached drive on a single computer.  It takes eons to backup 1.5TB of data, but once it does then everything just stays incrementally synced.  In the event of a disaster you can request a zip file of all your stuff to re-download, or you can pay them to send you an external hard drive.  I know there are several other services out there like this, but for $50 a year you can essentially backup everything.  For a home user that seems a far better option than trying to fiddle with tapes.  Plus there's the advantage of the backup being elsewhere so if there's a natural disaster your backup harddrive doesn't go poof with your primary storage since they're in the same demolished house.

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avatarI'm using the Dlink NAS....

I'm using the Dlink NAS.... It has 1Gb copper nic, and can do Raid 1...but only holds 2 disks. That way my bits are safe.... But the offsite rotation is the ultimate in saftey!

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avatarNot a bad choice for backing up huge amounts of data?

Actually, the MyBook Studio II IS a bad choice for backing up data. True, it is 4 TBs of hard drive space. But, it is (2) 2 TB drives in a RAID 0 array. So you are now relying on the integrity of 2 hard drives to store your data. Not wise in a back up situation.

 Like the other person said, and Atom-based build would probably be a bit cheaper, not as pretty, but FAR more secure and stable. I would use (4) 1 TB "Green" drives and I would have much more confidence in something like that.

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avatarBuild a cheap HTPC with an

Build a cheap HTPC with an atom core, and then grab a bunch of WD 1TB greenpowers for cheap NAS/Backup/media

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avatarTerrabyte backup off site

Better buy two devices and rotate one off site. I'd stick with

raid 5 if you don't rotate backups off site.

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