[SOLVED] Thinking About a Long Term Backup Solution

Oasis Curator

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I have found myself with 4 2TB WD Green drives.

My current backup solution for important data has been simply dragging and dropping the new files on to an external hard drive - all manually done every few months.
I plug in the external drive, copy the files, then disconnect and it stays in a drawer for months until the next time I back up. I don't leave it connected to the PC.

I'm wondering whether I can buy some sort of 2-bay storage enclosure and a software solution that I can use as a backup + redundancy (I think that's the term?). Essentially, each drive mirroring the other so I have two copies. Would be great if I can take one drive out and take it somewhere, accessing it independently.

I understand there are different RAID types but I think each disk having it's own copy of the data would be better than merging the disks into one large pool of space. Is RAID 1 what I need for disk mirroring? Is that done with software backup?

Is there some software that can back up files I select (or folders) on to one drive and provide a copy of that data on the drive? Will the software check for changes to files on the main PC and update the backup with new copies automatically when I run it?

Completely not bothered about Windows or images or anything like that, just certain files and folders on the main PC.

Thank you
 
Solution
RAID, of any type, is not a 'backup'.
What you're thinking of is RAID 1, mirrored.

But that just ensures that what happens, happens on both drives at the same time.
Virus, corruption, accidental deletion...

There are several tools you can use to copy selected folders off to a different drive.
FreeFileSynck or SyncBackFree.

Those might be used to copy your selected folders to some external device.
Assuming that external enclosure has two physical drives, just let it run twice.

Personally, I much prefer full drive backups.
I see far too many cases of people only backing up 'certain folders'. Then, at crunch time..."oops, I forgot that one important folder and its files".


The basic concept for backups is 3-2-1.
3 copies, on at least...

zipspyder

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I would do 2 sets of raid 1 (2 drives each) then use one to backup the other. You would would have 2 sets of data and each mirror can lose a drive and you would still be good. Or you can use backup software to make 4 sets of backups, one each drive but that doesn't seem very efficient.
 

USAFRet

Titan
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RAID, of any type, is not a 'backup'.
What you're thinking of is RAID 1, mirrored.

But that just ensures that what happens, happens on both drives at the same time.
Virus, corruption, accidental deletion...

There are several tools you can use to copy selected folders off to a different drive.
FreeFileSynck or SyncBackFree.

Those might be used to copy your selected folders to some external device.
Assuming that external enclosure has two physical drives, just let it run twice.

Personally, I much prefer full drive backups.
I see far too many cases of people only backing up 'certain folders'. Then, at crunch time..."oops, I forgot that one important folder and its files".


The basic concept for backups is 3-2-1.
3 copies, on at least 2 different media, at least one offsite or otherwise inaccessible.
A RAID 1 does not count as "2 devices"

 
Solution
You might consider mounting one backup drive internally for primary backup and a second one externally for a secondary...in a dock, in an enclosure, or even at the end of a powered cable.

The internal would do the job more quickly as it would not have to deal with a USB interface.

I'd certainly make backups more often than your current "every few months".

Maybe something like once or twice a day for the primary backup and weekly for the secondary. It all depends on how often you make new data or modify/delete old data. And of course on how valuable the data is generally. If highly valuable, maybe you run the secondary backup more often than weekly.

Any competent backup program will copy new or modified files to the backup drive, as well as delete files from the backup if they were deleted from the original source drive....if that's what you want to happen.

You could also use a standard flash drive for ad hoc backups of your most important files if you want a highly portable third copy of them.

Lots of software choices, free and paid. I use Sync Back Free without any problems. It has a fairly busy interface, but you'll get the hang of it. Make a few practice runs to ensure it is actually doing what you want. You select what to include or exclude from the backup....right down to the individual file level if necessary.

I back up about 1 TB of data every few hours to a WD Green 3 TB internal. Typically takes just under 2 minutes.
 

Oasis Curator

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I'd certainly make backups more often than your current "every few months".

Maybe something like once or twice a day for the primary backup and weekly for the secondary. It all depends on how often you make new data or modify/delete old data. And of course on how valuable the data is generally. If highly valuable, maybe you run the secondary backup more often than weekly.
You have said it - all depends how often I make the new data, which is not very often at all :p
My PC barely gets on once a week and most of that time is gaming rather than creating anything productive.

I am more concerned with hardware failure, which is why I want two copies.
Some people wouldn't consider RAID 1 as a backup solution. I would. If one hard drive fails, I have a second right there with the same data. Surely that's what backing up is about? Creating multiple copies of data? Yes, I can use the RAID that splits the data between the two drives (striping?) but I don't really see how that's hugely different and to be honest, don't really care as I from what I briefly read, it seems to be next to no different than copying data on to two different drives.
I don't have a home server or anything enterprise-ish - just a home PC.

And while having three copies, on two different mediums, one off site would be great, it's a huge amount of effort, time and money for something that is unlikely, especially when I can just locally store it. I don't worry about whether my house will burn down or I'll get robbed - I have judged that the liklihood is very small compared with the effort/time/money it would be to organise it.
That's my choice. I understand some will think I am balancing a knife, while blindfolded and throwing fire sticks, it's really not like that :p The most important things for backup are on two different cloud services, a DVD in the loft as well as a memory stick. They're also on the backup drive (that's two of them now), as well as the actual PC so I backup what's VERY important in many ways but stuff that isn't that important, much less effort.

In 20+ years of computing, the only thing I have actually lost, were some photo album master layouts and that was just a few months back.
The albums were printed and we we're not looking to redesign them again. All the photos are safe, so IF we ever did decided we wanted to redesign them, we'd just have to start from scratch. Not a major hardship.
The only reason it was missed is because I didn't change the default save location - C:\Users\Blah\Documents - which I use for nothing. All documents are stored on a separate drive so I can reinstall Windows without it affecting anything. Save location has now changed so all the master layouts will be saved properly from now on.

I'll take a look at FreeFileSync as that seems to be a good solution.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
RAID 1, mirror, is only effective against physical drive fail.
It does nothing for all the other means of data loss.
Ransomware, accidental deletion, formattion, etc, etc.


RAID 0?
Thats even worse.
There is NO protection, against anything. Loss of one drive means loss of ALL data in the array.
 
This is what I use on the hardware side: EZ Swap tray

And I use EASUS free software to clone one hard drive to another. Then remove the HDD from the tray and put it in a fire proof safe.

Next time retrieve the HDD and do the same thing again.

One of the benefits of cloning is that I don't have to restore anything. I just replace the drive with the back up drive and reboot to restore to my last backup point. But then I'm only doing one drive.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
But then I'm only doing one drive.
Right.
For a single drive and system, and done regularly, a clone can be somewhat effective.

If you have multiple drives or systems, like I do, no.

My current system has 6x SSD.
That would mean 6x drives to clone to.

And then, multiple systems.

With Images via Macrium, all that can be stored in a single folder tree.
I have a rolling 30 days Images of my main system. The other systems every other day, or weekly, as needs dictate.
 

4745454b

Titan
Moderator
About fireproof safes, they might not really be fireproof. A few years back my town burned down, ~95% of the homes were destroyed. My inlaws had a fireproof safe, and it melted. Legit melted. Everything in it was destroyed. A true backup is stored "off site". You might want to consider keeping the disks in a drawer/locket at your work, friends, parents, etc. That way if something happens to your house, your backup will be safe.
 

Oasis Curator

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About fireproof safes, they might not really be fireproof. A few years back my town burned down, ~95% of the homes were destroyed. My inlaws had a fireproof safe, and it melted. Legit melted. Everything in it was destroyed. A true backup is stored "off site". You might want to consider keeping the disks in a drawer/locket at your work, friends, parents, etc. That way if something happens to your house, your backup will be safe.
But what happens if there is a fire where the data is stored off-site?



I am personally only concerned with physical disk failure at the moment because literally ALL my computing life, I have never accidently deleted something from a backup, never had a randomware attack and never copied any viruses. I am not saying these things won't ever happen but the likelihood is very, very low... so low that it isn't worth my effort or money protecting against. Especially as the backup hard drives are physically disconnected from the system when they have finished backing things up.

I just wanted an easier / quicker way to essentially have two hard drives be a mirror of each other.
The dock I have can clone the drives without them being connected to the computer at all but I'm happy using Windows to do this than the in-built system from the dock. I know I'm complicating things by not having them connected to the system all the time (meaning I can't run regular backups from set folders) but it seems FreeFileSync will give me more of what I am looking at.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
But what happens if there is a fire where the data is stored off-site?
It is unlikely that this would happen to ALL copies at the same time.

For instance, my "cloud" is a large drive in a desk drawer at work.
In the highly unlikely event that the building actually burned down, the only thing lost is the physical drive.
All data still resides in my PCs or in the second level, on the NAS.

Now...if there were such a disaster to take out my house AND workplace at the same time...I probably have much larger things to worry about.

As far as direct clones as your backup routine...that becomes problematic when you have more than one drive and system.
I'd need at least a dozen extra drives for these clones.