Good Morning, All,
I am a mostly retired Grumpy Old Fart and have been quite unlucky <?> over the last nine months: I have had three<!> 250 GB SSDs fail. One as a result of a leaking AIO, one as a result of a failing PSU, and one for reasons unknown and unspecified. I had clumsy and difficult to use back ups, but they took much too long to restore from.....since what work I still do is extremely time sensitive with both time bonuses and penalties I simply cannot tolerate that!
Since I am putting a new system together (an mITX system) I thought I would build it with disaster planning in mind from the very beginning.
It has turned out that 250GB is sufficient to contain my OS, my Programs, and my Work Product (mostly office and CAD files).
My objective is to be able to recover from (almost) anything I can think of within 4 hours.
Since I have had such a bad time with hardware problems I am going to put OS+Pgms+Work Product on a pair of 250 GB Samsung SSDs set up as a bootable RAID 1 array. I will also have a 1 TB storage SSD. That should take care of any hardware issues....at least those that do not take out both SSDs at the same time.
To protect against a dual failure, as well as malware, user idiocy, et.al., I will implement time tiered backups on my server.
I am using an HP EliteOffice Mini (an I5-6500 machine) attached to a 5-bay Orico Drive Enclosure. This enclosure takes 3.5" HDDs and includes hardware RAID in several flavors. I have a LOT of media files....enough that I will use three of the bays to contain 3 TB Seagate Barracuda HDDs. The remaining two bays will contain 3TB Seagate Ironwolf HDDs. These two drives will contain NAS backups from my production machine. Since this IS disaster planning, the two drives will implement hardware RAID 1.
After a lot of research and considering, I have decided on a tiered approach to making backups: daily, weekly, and monthly.
I will run a Differential backup at shut down daily, I will run a full backup on shut down on Sunday, and on the first of each month I will remove an external USB3 Drive from my fire safe and run a full backup!
Since my OS+Programs SSDs are fairly small, I will maintain at least a full week of differential backups deleting the oldest each day a new backup is created.
Just a word on differential vs incremental backups: an incremental back up consists of a chain of files: one file for each day plus the last full backup. If ANY link in the chain is corrupted that chain is lost. Differential backup consists of only one multi-day file of changes covering the time from last full backup plus the last full backup: only TWO files. This should be six or seven times more reliable than the incremental backups and so it is what I have chosen.
WHEW! And that, at last, is it! Have I missed anything or misunderstood anything? What are your comments and/or recommendations?
TIA,
Larry
I am a mostly retired Grumpy Old Fart and have been quite unlucky <?> over the last nine months: I have had three<!> 250 GB SSDs fail. One as a result of a leaking AIO, one as a result of a failing PSU, and one for reasons unknown and unspecified. I had clumsy and difficult to use back ups, but they took much too long to restore from.....since what work I still do is extremely time sensitive with both time bonuses and penalties I simply cannot tolerate that!
Since I am putting a new system together (an mITX system) I thought I would build it with disaster planning in mind from the very beginning.
It has turned out that 250GB is sufficient to contain my OS, my Programs, and my Work Product (mostly office and CAD files).
My objective is to be able to recover from (almost) anything I can think of within 4 hours.
Since I have had such a bad time with hardware problems I am going to put OS+Pgms+Work Product on a pair of 250 GB Samsung SSDs set up as a bootable RAID 1 array. I will also have a 1 TB storage SSD. That should take care of any hardware issues....at least those that do not take out both SSDs at the same time.
To protect against a dual failure, as well as malware, user idiocy, et.al., I will implement time tiered backups on my server.
I am using an HP EliteOffice Mini (an I5-6500 machine) attached to a 5-bay Orico Drive Enclosure. This enclosure takes 3.5" HDDs and includes hardware RAID in several flavors. I have a LOT of media files....enough that I will use three of the bays to contain 3 TB Seagate Barracuda HDDs. The remaining two bays will contain 3TB Seagate Ironwolf HDDs. These two drives will contain NAS backups from my production machine. Since this IS disaster planning, the two drives will implement hardware RAID 1.
After a lot of research and considering, I have decided on a tiered approach to making backups: daily, weekly, and monthly.
I will run a Differential backup at shut down daily, I will run a full backup on shut down on Sunday, and on the first of each month I will remove an external USB3 Drive from my fire safe and run a full backup!
Since my OS+Programs SSDs are fairly small, I will maintain at least a full week of differential backups deleting the oldest each day a new backup is created.
Just a word on differential vs incremental backups: an incremental back up consists of a chain of files: one file for each day plus the last full backup. If ANY link in the chain is corrupted that chain is lost. Differential backup consists of only one multi-day file of changes covering the time from last full backup plus the last full backup: only TWO files. This should be six or seven times more reliable than the incremental backups and so it is what I have chosen.
WHEW! And that, at last, is it! Have I missed anything or misunderstood anything? What are your comments and/or recommendations?
TIA,
Larry
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