Setting up a recovery system for file archiving

[JKKdev]

I was feeling excited as I was just setting up a new website when my excitment was met with a somewhat loud clicking noise from within my tower. When I tried to save one of the images I was working on my heart started to pound hard as Windows froze and my worst fear was realized.

My data drive just died. Since I was of a mind set that this can't happen to me I had no backups or redundancy in place. While my data drive is in the hands of data recovery gods I turn to this forums to figure out what kind of a solution I should invest in to prevent a hardware error from destroying my data.

Storytelling aside...
Since this happend earlier today my research lead me from RAID to Storage Spaces, NASs, cloud storage and all the possible faults that this systems have. First a disclaimer: I am aware that RAID is not a backup system (not the title). Now with that out of the way... Since I don't have an unlimited funding I'm aware that you can't prevent every user and hardware error on the planet. So I decided that what I'm interested in is preventing as many possible hardware errors and use my own head to prevent the user ones.

I also have certain limitations which limit my options in backup technology:

- My internet connection is 30Mbps/3Mbps which means that cloud storage is a no-go (and upgrading the speed significantly sadly isn't an option).
- My internal networking structure is still on 100Mbps and with the prices of NAS, drives and at least a 1Gbps structure it is unfortunately out of my budget.

This leads me to what I would currently consider a somewhat reliable solution for file archiving:
- Storage Spaces Mirrored drives to protect me from drive death
- weekly or on demand backup to the third drive in the system to protect me from data corruption

And finally to my questions:
1) Is this a viable combination in a windows environment?
2) What software to use for the backup part?
3) What size of a drive would you recommend for the backup part (Mirrored drives would be 2 or 4 TB)?

Thank you all for the read and any help you can provide
Regards

 

[mgallo848]

I used EaseUS Data Recovery Pro that saved about 95% of my items I nearly lost on a 3 TB hard drive. I can't guarantee it will work for you (depending on how bad the drive is) but if the things you lost are valuable to you it's worth looking into.

https://www.easeus.com/data-recovery-software/

 

[jsmithepa]

RAID only necessarily if you must be up ASAP, can't wait even a couple of days.

Backup can take resources and time, the more you know about your data, the more efficient you can be. For example your Audio/Video library doesn't change much, u can back those up maybe once a month? However your web development is constantly changing and need backup daily.

 

[JKKdev]

I used EaseUS Data Recovery Pro that saved about 95% of my items I nearly lost on a 3 TB hard drive. I can't guarantee it will work for you (depending on how bad the drive is) but if the things you lost are valuable to you it's worth looking into.

https://www.easeus.com/data-recovery-software/

As I've stated (maybe not obviously enough ) the drive won't spin up as I believe the heads are hitting something. I wonder if this heatwave had anything to do with it breaking down o.0 If the quoted price will be out of my budget I might give the old freeze-and-run technique a whirl before I go setting up a clean room

RAID only necessarily if you must be up ASAP, can't wait even a couple of days.

Backup can take resources and time, the more you know about your data, the more efficient you can be. For example your Audio/Video library doesn't change much, u can back those up maybe once a month? However your web development is constantly changing and need backup daily.

Can you advise on a software that would give me the ability to setup different backup patterns for different folders aswell as give me an option to backup a folder on demand (e.g. I just downloaded an event's worth of photos from my camera and I want it in my backup asap). Also if backup drive would be my sole "backup" does this backup software inform me if my backup drive has failed (I have to drop everything and get a new one just in case the main one fails). All the backups

 

[USAFRet]

Can you advise on a software that would give me the ability to setup different backup patterns for different folders aswell as give me an option to backup a folder on demand (e.g. I just downloaded an event's worth of photos from my camera and I want it in my backup asap). Also if backup drive would be my sole "backup" does this backup software inform me if my backup drive has failed (I have to drop everything and get a new one just in case the main one fails). All the backups

A combination of Macrium Reflect for full drive or partition images.
SyncBackFree or FreeeFileSync for individual folders.

Read here for options with Macrium:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3383768/backup-situation-home.html

 

[JKKdev]

Can you advise on a software that would give me the ability to setup different backup patterns for different folders aswell as give me an option to backup a folder on demand (e.g. I just downloaded an event's worth of photos from my camera and I want it in my backup asap). Also if backup drive would be my sole "backup" does this backup software inform me if my backup drive has failed (I have to drop everything and get a new one just in case the main one fails). All the backups

A combination of Macrium Reflect for full drive or partition images.
SyncBackFree or FreeeFileSync for individual folders.

Read here for options with Macrium:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3383768/backup-situation-home.html

Thank you I will read through the post as it looks like it has some good information . Since I cannot afford a NAS my next best thing for backup that's not directly connected to the tower would be an external HDD enclosure (I'm looking at something like this https://www.raidsonic.de/en/standards/searchresults.php?we_objectID=481).

A new question came to mind tho. When a backup is happening I would expect that reads and writes would be slower if I wanted to work while it's backing up. Is it reasonable to expect that I would be able to use the machine while it's backing up drives? What about a risk of corrupted data if a save happens unexpectedly? Or is this stuff handled by the backup software?

 

[USAFRet]

Thank you I will read through the post as it looks like it has some good information . Since I cannot afford a NAS my next best thing for backup that's not directly connected to the tower would be an external HDD enclosure (I'm looking at something like this https://www.raidsonic.de/en/standards/searchresults.php?we_objectID=481).

A new question came to mind tho. When a backup is happening I would expect that reads and writes would be slower if I wanted to work while it's backing up. Is it reasonable to expect that I would be able to use the machine while it's backing up drives? What about a risk of corrupted data if a save happens unexpectedly? Or is this stuff handled by the backup software?

Yes, a USB drive will work just fine.

Ideally you don't want to be using the system while it is doing the backup.
But Macrium takes a snapshot of the system as the backup starts.

And if you set it up correctly, the interim backups (Incremental or Differential) don't take much time.
My nightly Incrementals take a whole 2-3 minutes.

 

[JKKdev]

Thank you I will read through the post as it looks like it has some good information . Since I cannot afford a NAS my next best thing for backup that's not directly connected to the tower would be an external HDD enclosure (I'm looking at something like this https://www.raidsonic.de/en/standards/searchresults.php?we_objectID=481).

A new question came to mind tho. When a backup is happening I would expect that reads and writes would be slower if I wanted to work while it's backing up. Is it reasonable to expect that I would be able to use the machine while it's backing up drives? What about a risk of corrupted data if a save happens unexpectedly? Or is this stuff handled by the backup software?

Yes, a USB drive will work just fine.

Ideally you don't want to be using the system while it is doing the backup.
But Macrium takes a snapshot of the system as the backup starts.

And if you set it up correctly, the interim backups (Incremental or Differential) don't take much time.
My nightly Incrementals take a whole 2-3 minutes.

I hope it's the last question but who knows How big should the incremental backup drive be? I'm looking at a 2TB WD Blue as my main file storage. Now I would put another one of those in the enclosure once a week for a full backup but I'd like to keep another drive in the enclosure all the time for daily incremental backups. Should this drive be any bigger or is 2TB large enough (I never fill the drive fully).

 

[USAFRet]

I hope it's the last question but who knows How big should the incremental backup drive be? I'm looking at a 2TB WD Blue as my main file storage. Now I would put another one of those in the enclosure once a week for a full backup but I'd like to keep another drive in the enclosure all the time for daily incremental backups. Should this drive be any bigger or is 2TB large enough (I never fill the drive fully).

In Macrium Reflect, an Incremental is all the changes since the last Full or Incremental.
From my 500GB C drive, nightly Incrementals are anywhere between 2 and 13GB.

Just depends on what changed since the last one.

If you've got this on a schedule, though...the Full and the Incremental images need to be in the same folder on the same drive.

 

[JKKdev]

I hope it's the last question but who knows How big should the incremental backup drive be? I'm looking at a 2TB WD Blue as my main file storage. Now I would put another one of those in the enclosure once a week for a full backup but I'd like to keep another drive in the enclosure all the time for daily incremental backups. Should this drive be any bigger or is 2TB large enough (I never fill the drive fully).

In Macrium Reflect, an Incremental is all the changes since the last Full or Incremental.
From my 500GB C drive, nightly Incrementals are anywhere between 2 and 13GB.

Just depends on what changed since the last one.

If you've got this on a schedule, though...the Full and the Incremental images need to be in the same folder on the same drive.

I understand this. What I meant was when a full backup will be made I'd clone the drive to another one. I think this is more or less what I want/need.

Thank you very much for your help it is greatly appreciated.

Cheers