Alternative to Raid 1 for Backup

[di11on]

Hi folks,

I want to get a NAS for my home business and personal home networking needs. Currently I have a second HD in my main PC which is shared and gets backed up to an external hard drive every night. Anyone in the house that has important stuff knows to put it here so that it gets back up.

This arrangement is not ideal because:
- I need to have my PC on 24/7
- Windows 7 is sometimes flaky and the shared drive drops off the network
- I'm running out of space on this second hard disk on my desktop

So I'm thinking a NAS is the solution. The main idea is that this would serve as a backup destination for stuff on the various laptops in the house and also serve as a shared network drive for storage of pictures etc.

My question is how to back this up. I know that RAID 1 is not a backup solution - but wouldn't it at least provide protection against mechanical failure of a hard drive? If it doesn't at least do this - then what is the point? If RAID 1 is not a solution for this - then is there a way I could have two drives in a NAS box and have them back each other up in a more robust way than RAID 1?

I am just trying to protect against mechanical failure here. I'm looking at a cloud backup for the really important stuff, but I don't envisage putting everything up on the cloud.

Thoughts?

 

[navalweaponsofficer]

if you get a good NAS you will have different array types that can be used such as 5 which is parity. You can also have two disk parity. I have a NAS model DS410 from https://www.synology.com/en-us/ it uses a SHR which is a hybrid raid. Thereis not a huge need to back it up but what I do is just back up the entire array to one single large 6GB Disk in the computer this protects me against NAS failure not disk failure. if a disk in the array fails the NAS beeps.

 

[Solandri]

The point of RAID 1 (and RAID 5) is to prevent downtime. A drive can die and your system or NAS will still function, while you order and wait for a replacement drive to arrive. If downtime will not adversely affect what you do, then RAID 1 is not necessary. If this is just a media server and backup repository for your other computers, it doesn't need to be RAID 1.

If this is a file server which holds the only copy of some of your files, then you want a NAS plus an external HDD. Backup all the files on the NAS to the external HDD about once a week. Once a day would seem to be better, but that usually leads to just leaving the backup drive always plugged in. Then one day a lightning bolt hits your wiring and fries both your NAS and your backup drive. You want to backup to an external drive, then unplug the backup. Better yet, take the backup drive to work and store it there, in case your house burns down.

 

[di11on]

All things considered, since I don't really need RAID, it would seem a waste to put 2 drives in a NAS box - I'd be better off using a second as an external backup and leave it empty for upscaling when the need arises.

Assuming you have a local backup, doesn't Raid 1 only save you around an hour's down time every 3-5 years or so?

Regarding off site backup, I just had the brain wave of plugging a USB disk into my mother-in-law's router - that way it's off-site but I can access it remotely and I don't have to trust a corporation with my data. Main down side is that it will be limited by my mother-in-law's upload rate which is probably in the region of 1mbps.

Actually - this concept could be generalised - peer to peer distributed backups - crowd backups!