A reminder that there is no single backup solution. I have five 2TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra external drives, I very recently bought two of their 3TB models as well one was white and the other blue. I wanted to rationalise my movie collection and get everything onto the 3TB drives and mirrored on the two drives I bought. I got the first drive from Amazon on Oct 22nd and was very very happy with it, got all my stuff moved to it and then thought got to duplicate quickly so I bought another one, copied the entire 2.2 TB collection to the new drive and was able to relax a bit. Tonight I loaded the white one (first one I bought) and got the dreaded click, click, click of a failing drive, a few minutes later it had failed completely, no advance warning from the SMART firmware just cold death all of a sudden. I had an inkling that something was up with this one, I didn't trust it as much as the later blue one, why, well while copying from SSD to external drive on USB 3 the blue one would peg out at about 80MB a second, but the white one was sinusoidal, up and down in the most regular pattern you could picture with a peak of about 70MB a second, in fact this pattern here Drives should not do this when the files are large contiguous files, copy operations should be pretty smooth, anyway I guess my instinct was correct as it is now dead as of tonight. Well, I've never lost anything (yet) my mirroring strategy worked, however I am now exposed until I get a replacement drive as I only have one working copy of a large collection that it would upset me if I lost, so I need a new drive and soon. Next step return the drive get a refund from Amazon, and buy another one, in fact I will probably buy another before I send this one back. I will actually buy another identical Western Digital 3TB drive these things are great I love them they are tiny and have such huge capacity, this is just one failure out of seven drives, you could see that as a high failure rate but I have bought a vast number of drives over the years and this is only the second Western Digital to ever fail on me, I've lost five Maxtor drives to hardware failure and several Seagates, but never lost an IBM/Hitachi drive or a Toshiba. So moral of the story, all hard drives fail, never keep just one copy of anything that really matters to you, and the sheer amount of data that we all own now is utterly huge and there are no easy ways to back it all up quickly, but back it up you must!
Easy to lose track of your backup and storage strategy, especially when it is spread over multiple drives. As well as backing up occasionaly to hard drives, I mirror my critical files in real time to my MEGA online account using Megasynch.
My super critical files sit on Spideroak storage. Encrypted prior to upload, encrypted by Spideroak. Dave your avatar is almost back in season
That is fundamentally the same as the main system I use for what I consider to be my critical private storage for things like passwords and the likes, but I only have 200MB of storage on that and the higher tiers are expensive. What are the transfer speeds like now that you are on fibre Paul?
Like you mentioned Jim primarily used for password storage due to the encryption they offer. So the few important files I have there are small text files so can't comment on upload speed. Plus the upload is only performed on a password update or a new account I add to the files. As you can see if you read their bumf the data is secure. Even if compromised there's no way of hacking the data. They have no keys or passwords. The weakest link in the chain is initial account creation on web. As you know SSL is getting quite beefy now anyhow. You can even download your encrypted data blocks exactly as they store it on their servers should you wish. There are apps for all OS's I believe. I have nothing illegal to hide of course but gives me peace of mind that my data is secure, properly secure.
I can't see a price for the 'SpiderOak Encryptr' feature is that something that is separate from the main backup thing? I would be interested in the Terabyte package mostly to back up my software development folders, and it is big enough for my entire photo collection and I have always wanted offsite backup for that, being securely encrypted is just a bonus! I suspect that this is based on the technology of the open source solution that I currently use, which if it is it's wonderful!
They are new products that have been added after I signed up, both Encryptr and Kloak are new to me. When I joined they just had Spideroak, now rebranded as SpideroakONE. I'm guessing the 1tb is related to SpideroakONE. There's a 60 day trial to demo it Jim so nothing lost either way.
Fellas, nobody mentions NAS. Does anyone have a Synology for example? I have squeaky bum time even though I have many external hard drives. I would really like a system which automatically backs up to a few drives. I get sick of all the cables and power supplies that I have to connect.....
I wouldn't recommend that you use those single drives like that for backup. The grade of the drives contained within these consumer boxes is not very high and being a single drive they are a disaster waiting to happen. I use two independent synology NAS devices using RAID 5 (with 16TB each) to mirror each other and have critical data on a tape drive and I retire the drives and tapes on a rota basis. The drives are use are enterprise drives which are more reliable (although more expensive) than the consumer-grade drives. I now have about 10TB of data and I haven't lost any of it in 20 years. The reason for rotating the drives and duplicating the units, for those interested, is that although a RAID 5 array allows one drive to fail and it will still function, it places a great load on the remaining drives when its rebuilding the array. This means that it is likely that if the failure was an age related one and all the drives were the same age, another drive might fail during the rebuild process, rendering the whole array useless. Replacing one drive every six months deliberately means that no drive in the array is more than 2 years and 6 months old and that no drive is the same age. As a further precaution, the whole system is mirrored onto another redundant unit which means that even if a drive does fail during a RAID rebuild, the data is still intact. Disadvantages of this system. Its expensive. And it requires you to buy a new drive every 6 months and throw the old one away. It depends on how serious you are about your data.
NAS is fine Mike but maybe you've answered your own question and cloud is the better alternative? All down to one's own preference of course but synchronisation is handled better in that mechanism for personal use.
Using a cloud is ok so long as you don't have confidential data and you are confortable handing over the management and control of your data to a third party company who may choose to disclose it to whatever government agency comes knocking, or be hacked and expose your information. Personally I prefer my data to be under my control alone.
John, do you think the Synology DS215j is good? Computer Shopper gave it 5 stars and it is £130 Inc VAT? Do you use Western Digital drives like oss? Is it imperative to have 2 independent NAS? Which tape backup do you have?
As i said all down to personal preference but I'd suggest you read the information on Spideroak to give you an overall view.
Read the Spideroak website bumf. Youre not handing anything over. They have zero knowledge of yor data.
I keep my data on the move and I have not lost anything in 20 years too, but I'm not well enough off to go for enterprise grade drives, plus I've seen exactly the scenario you refer to happen on a RAID 5 stripped array on a live factory production server. For my use manually mirrored external 2.5" WD drives are fine, my code is in SVN and on many machines at once, what I am backing up is my photo archive mostly and that is currently mirrored (manually) on 4 disks. These disks are ideal for international travel which is another reason for my choice.
I have edited my comment above to make it clearer why I do what I do. My data is important to me and my business so I can't afford to take chances. I use Seagate Constellation (enterprise) drives in one unit and Western digital RE (also enterprise) drives in the other. That mitigates risk due to a design fault in the drives wiping out both servers. I use a quantum SDLT tape drive which is quite old, but I only use it for critical data and the amounts I write monthly are relatively small. I don't think there is much to choose from between western digital and Seagate. For slightly less money you could use the WD Red drives in a synology NAS with no problems. Synology make good NAS boxes. The 215J is only a 2 bay NAS which restricts you to some extent. If you want resilience then you will be forced to 'mirror' which means you are wasting half the drives capacity (you install two 4TB drives and you get to use only 4TB of storage). If you don't mirror, then you won't have a good backup solution from that unit because you will be exposed to a single drive failure which you don't want - as @oss demonstrated. It's not a good idea to rely on a single drive for backup. I feel that a better solution is to employ raid in a 4 bay NAS. Raid 5, for example, allows you to buy 4 drives and use the full capacity of three of them. There is less wasted space. It has the disadvantage though that if the drive fails, the unit has to work hard to rebuild the failed drive which can be a problem if all the drives are the same age and another one is on the edge of failure. The performance of raid 5 is also not as good as some other choices so it might not be a good choice for a big database for example. However, for archiving material it works well. You can get around the drive failure issue somewhat by retiring drives on a rota. Or by using a second unit as I do, or by using a different RAID level such as 6. Or, you could choose to configure the synology unit to 'mirror' (raid 1) and hence waste half your capacity but since you have four drives you have more capacity to waste anyways. Typically in these cases, the more resilence you have for drive failure, the more wasted capacity you get. There is always a trade off between cost, performance, storage capacity and resilience. There's a saying in photography. 'Cheap, Fast, Good'. choose two. Well, in storage it will be 'Cheap, Fast, Reliable'. Choose two. It depends on how much you're willing to spend, how risk averse you are, and how much storage and flexibility you need. If money is not object I would recommend that you shop around for a 4 bay NAS like the DS414. Its quite a bit more expensive - about £300 from amazon right now: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Synology-DS414-DiskStation-Bay-Desktop/dp/B00FWUQY5I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1447339676&sr=8-1&keywords=synology DS414 and then buy 4 western digital red drives to populate it. Then you'll have a pretty reliable system. If money is an object, then you could do with the unit you mention, buy two drives, run them in raid 1 (mirror) and accept that you have wasted half your storage space for redundancy.
