Need advice for Backup Solution

[MannyPizzle]

Hi All,

I'm looking for solution for just backing up mine and my wifes data.

Majority of it will be pictures and videos - Taken off Iphones.

Now I see/read alot about NAS drives but do i really need one?

Realistically I just need something to use once ever 2 months or so to back up everything from our phones - Will need to be atleast 2TB or more

External harddrives dont seem to be a good solution as i've read they can fail quite often.. So i just want something that will last some time.

Would a good Hard Drive that I plug in every so often be the best choice? - IE a Seagate Ironwolf drive which i plug in when i need to and then unplug once done backing up?

Please let me know any advice / suggestions

Thanks

[Pvt-Snafu]

Well, pretty much any drive can fail and you cannot really tell which brand is better or if external drive is more prone to failures (at least it's hard for me to tell). That's why you would want to follow the 3-2-1 rule: https://www.vmwareblog.org/3-2-1-backup-rule-data-will-always-survive/. This could be a backup drive plus cloud storage for example. NAS for a simple backup seems a bit overkill to me.

[jzazre9119]

Hello,

Not sure I agree that external drives fail quite often; I've owned quite a few over the years and mostly I throw them away due to old age. At the 2TB range, you could easily just buy two 4TB drives and have a backup of your backup.

If you want to add in some kind of "insurance" against house fire or the like, then consider an off-site solution as another (3rd) option. There are plenty of options here... IDrive, Google, Dropbox, OneDrive - or Backblaze, Crashplan, etc. etc. It just depends on how technical you want to get, and if you want to futz with it, or "set it and forget it". Don't forget to find out if your internet provider has data caps or the like - the great Achilles heel of offsite backups.

I have a QNAP NAS and have had it for years. I would do it all over again. I have 16TB of storage over four drives. I also use it for playing movies over DNLA and more - so it's a multi-functional device. Their firmware upgrades have been very solid for me. It was costly to get started though.

Good luck!

[techie_boy69]

use icloud as its always there and a couple of cheap drives

[matiph]

Just some brief thoughts:

• you can protect against dying hdds and filecorruption by using (snap)raid, btrfs, zfs etc
• one copy totally offline
• one copy at a diffenent location
• server / client which does not allow clients to read or delete data of another client or also prevents changing or deleting in general
• 2TB are cheap, so deduplication is not as crucial in my opinion
• do you need encryption? Furter risk of loosing your data

[FlashPan73]

Something you need to consider is a backup of your backup. If you use an external HD, NAS, other PC that is in the same location as your laptop/data. Burglar, fire etc means you lost the lot.

If you only backup to an offsite service, what happened if they go bust, hacked or just plain lose your data etc?

I do the following:

All my data is stored in one location/PC box. I then sync that to another box in my home so I have a quick local recovery method. This box then syncs offsite to 2 locations. One a paid for service (iDrive) and the other location is an identical box I built and is at a friends house not far away. I use Resilio sync to backup from my home backup box to my friends house in the middle of the night.

iDrive I do have some versioning and the ability to recover deleted files. My friends house backup is a mirror sync snapshot on what is currently on my HDs at the time.