Internal or NAS Storage for backup and recovery?

[firehawk_1]

I have a large enterprisy type server I use for heavy duty work and has the following configuration in terms of drives:

2x2TB RAID0
1x 480GB SSD
1x 500GB HDD
1x 3TB HDD

Of course, I take backups (full system backup actually - just the SSD boot and 2x2TB RAID0)
I usually store the backup on, what used to be, a 4TB internal HDD.

There was a recent unfortunate and ironic event that happened and has made me rethink about a few things.

I want to be able to do backups and store them away. Sure, the internal HDD is the way to go however I am thinking if it would be better to have a NAS box and have the backups stored on there? I will be connected to a 1Gbps network (internal in the home).

The trouble I have deciding is this and I hope you can help me decide:

1) if I want to do a whole system wide (all drives) backup and do incremental backups for the non system drives (SSD and 2x2TB RAID0), this requires a lot of storage which means I need to swap 2 or even 3 hard drives into the internal system to backup and restore from. Can be a hassle but its not too bad I guess. IF I use a NAS box, how SLOW or FAST would it be compared to if I plugged the HDD directly into the main desktop system and do the backups?

2) Should I be doing incremental or only full backups of my main system drives? Normally I just do a full backup and delete the previous backup (if the new backup is successful) to save space. I don't want to take a chance with Acronis backup and recovery advanced server as it is flakey but works great when it works, especially when doing a barebone restore (i.e I can restore my backup on a completely different computer and everything still works - just need to install drivers and all is good)


Thank you.

 

[kanewolf]

How often does your OS disk change? It shouldn't be very often for things that need to be backed up. A full backup with incrementals should be appropriate. Redo the full backup every month or so to prevent too many increments from having to be applied.

How "expensive" is downtime? That really dictates how much effort and expense to put into backups. For instance, you could backup applications or you could reinstall. Restoring the application executables from backups might be faster. Reinstalling the executables would be cheaper.
Obviously data files and config files are different than the executables. Those should be backed up daily. Again you could do a full backup weekly and incrementals nightly.

 

[firefoxx04]

Internal drives will be faster unless you are running a proper 10Gbps network. That said, internal drives are a terrible choice for mission critical backups. Any virus or malicious user that has access to the machine will be able to wipe out the backups.

The best backup solution would be over the network. What I would do is build a linux or freeBSD machine running ZFS. FeeBSD has ZFS natively but it works nicely on ubuntu (kind of a learning curve for linux).

If you are not familiar with ZFS, see this link to learn about how it can protect your data with filesystem checksumming and snapshots. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Reference/ZFS



I backup my fileserver onto a networked server running Ubuntu + ZFS. The Ubuntu machine takes a screenshot of the filesystem on a weekly basis. It also runs a "scrub" every week. The scrub checks for data that does not match the checksums, and then reverts the data back. This prevents silent data corruption or bit rot. The snapshots let you roll back to a previous date if a virus or user wipes out the data. Because ZFS runs at the bit level, any action taken against the server over the network can be reversed as long as there is a snapshot available. ZFS is IMMUNE to virus attacks and even randsomware as long as you have your snapshots.

One thing to consider, ZFS requires ECC ram. People will argue that to the death and claim they never had issues. Its just important to understand that ZFS relies on RAM a lot more than other filesystems, and if an error occurs in ram there is a likely chance that the filesystem will write that error to the disk, causing corruption that is undetectable by the filesystem itself. ECC DDR3 is cheep, dont skip out on it.

 

[USAFRet]

"Internal or NAS" = both.

My backup regime for the main PC:
C drive:
Full backup to an internal HDD (3TB WD Green) every night at 2 AM. Keep 2 weeks worth, deleting the oldest
Full backup weekly, to the house server. Keep 4 weeks, deleting the oldest.

Macrium Reflect Free does this automatically.

Data drives:
Depending on the particular drive, synced every 6 or 24 hours internally, and weekly externally

Synback Free does this automatically.

 

[firehawk_1]

thanks for all your responses! I wasn't expecting it to be this fast.

alright, so here are some answers to those questions:

1) Mission critical! this is my main desktop system where I do work from. Downtime = losing money but can work on *some* items from my laptop. Having a system down for 3 days is just terrible and should be avoided. I have been able to get a system up and running in about a day or less by doing a full backup previously and restoring it to another physical computer which was great (the mobo died on the machine).

2) My SSD is a boot drive and the 2x2TB is just all data storage containing apps, Users folder, IIS etc... (essentially most of the core Windows stuff like the users, documents, program files etc... have been diverted to this drive). SSD only changes I guess with Windows Update where as the 2x2TB changes daily. I would like to backup the SSD fully at least once a month due to Windows Updates (or incremental - whichever you think is best)

3) I am hesitant to create a box with the ZFS stuff because I already paid for an expensive backup software and want to utilise that. Plus it gives me the option of doing a barebone restore which is a major plus for me in the unlikely event that I need to either change my main desktop system or replace the motherboard. However it does seem a nice solution too!

Internal drives are faster - yes, you are correct. I just wanted to see how much of a difference would there be in terms of doing a backup and copying the files over the 1Gbps network to the NAS box and also then doing a restore FROM the NAS box to the computer. Maybe doing a restore would be where I take out the HDD's from the NAS box and put it into the computer and have the backup software read the backups on the drives and do a restore? Would that be advised or not?

Thanks again for these useful and important comments/answers! I am still deciding what to do - NAS or several internal HDD's. I want the backups to run overnight but don't want them to be taking several hours to do a backup (and restore). The problem with several drives internally is that I would have to probably swap them when they get fuller as the backup happens and I wouldn't want to really be sitting up all night waiting to see if the backups will be successful or not or waiting to swap the drives. AND means I have to power down the system to swap out to a new drive.