8TB HDDs, Internal and External - Backup Solution

Soldato
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Hi All,

Hopefully a basic one for you all.

I have been searching for a solution that is simple to use and that requires no effort on my behalf to maintain. The problem that that needs the solution is that I am now producing YouTube videos and they are taking up a lot of my space on my existing HDDs, and I have no backup at all.

I looked at getting something like a WD external drive solution that has RAID1 but I am unsure on how good these actually are. All I ever see if people shucking these and not actually using them as intended.

So, I came up with the idea that I would add a new 8TB HDD to my PC internally, and have the same size externally that the internal automatically backs up too on a schedule. My thinking is that if one fails, the other is the backup, but also as one will be internal and the other not, this adds another layer of protection from fault too. If I put it all onto an external, and even if that external had RAID1, there is always the chance the device will fail itself and my data lost anyway - right?

My questions to you all are is my idea stupid and also, what manufactures should I gravitate too and which to avoid with the drives?

All thoughts welcome.

Thanks

Scott
 
Soldato
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If you dont need to access your stuff often, I recommend buying a 2nd hand LTO 3(or higher) tape drive from the bay.. I bought a LTO3 drive a few yrs ago for £20 to backup my 4tb media drive, as I just can't make myself buy a 4tb+ drive just to use as a backup, because its such a waste... So yeah you can get a 400gb tape for my drive at about a tenner if you look around, and a LTO3 drive requires a SCSI card, I managed to find a pcie card from the bay for about tenner.

Since having the drive I have only had to test it out once after a virus wiped my media drive clean, and it restored all my media drive perfectly without any problems, but it was slow to restore 4tb+ at 60-70mb/s... But what more do you want, it totally saved the day.
 
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Soldato
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If you dont need to access your stuff often, I recommend buying a 2nd hand LTO 3(or higher) tape drive from the bay.. I bought a LTO3 drive a few yrs ago for £20 to backup my 4tb media drive, as I just can't make myself buy a 4tb+ drive just to use as a backup, because its such a waste... So yeah you can get a 400gb tape for my drive at about a tenner if you look around, and a LTO3 drive requires a SCSI card, I managed to find a pcie card from the bay for about tenner.

Since having the drive I have only had to test it out once after a virus wiped my media drive clean, and it restored all my media drive perfectly without any problems, but it was slow to restore 4tb+ at 60-70mb/s... But what more do you want, it totally saved the day.

I can see your logic, but I will need to access more often than that. It will be in constant use too. Already in the last 2 weeks I have 150gb of recordings (that includes RAW recordings) so 400gb a tape is not going to work.

I have been looking again at the external drive options and was looking at the ones you buy drives to go into. They actually look ok to me, but again this is my single point of failure worry...or is that just a stupid worry to even have?
 
Soldato
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Well RAID isn't really a backup solution because whatever happens to 1 drive will happen to other, accept if the drive fails.

Yea sorry I get you. The raid gives me the redundancy if a drive fails, which is what I could rely on if one did fail.

So I guess there are two things to consider here, 1) do I need backup or redundancy, and 2) if backup, do I need redundancy on that backup.

Honestly I think I am leaning towards an internal HDD and an external HDD of the same size, using backup software on a schedule. The redundancy then would be that I have the data in two locations.
 
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Yea sorry I get you. The raid gives me the redundancy if a drive fails, which is what I could rely on if one did fail.

So I guess there are two things to consider here, 1) do I need backup or redundancy, and 2) if backup, do I need redundancy on that backup.

Honestly I think I am leaning towards an internal HDD and an external HDD of the same size, using backup software on a schedule. The redundancy then would be that I have the data in two locations.

What I do is keep a mirror on an external drive ( its actually a cheap nas just running as a backup ) and also once a week create a backup of the backup. This gives me one week to discover that a file has been accidentally deleted and recover it from the third backup. It's not a perfect system of course but it works for me. It's not the end of the world if I lose a file just very inconvenient. All the drives are just cheap drives. The chances of all of them failing at the same time is very small.
 
Soldato
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Many good ideas in here. Just trying to work out what is best for me.

I need to decide if I am going to keep my RAW footage post-upload and the original pre-upload renders, or just the renders. In 2 weeks I have already tallied up 275gb of video...
 
Soldato
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Just bought a 8tb WD My Book on the rain forest for a decent price. Checked camelcamelcamel and it appears to be a rather good price due to black Friday.

Will sort an internal drive when I am able.
 
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I wouldn't advise using an external HDD to back up your data.
I'm currently using this option, and I don't like it.

Follow the 3 - 2 - 1 data backup strategy.
3 copies of your data, two of which are local, and 1 off site.

To fix this, my solutions are:
-Switch to Synology or DIY NAS Home Server (more expensive option - your own 2nd computer just to store data, plex, nextcloud etc etc), to backup your data.
-Then it is important to have a backup of your backup.
-BackBlaze is my preferred option - unlimited backups for $5 per month (for windows/macos) - encrypt all data before sending to the cloud backup.

I have just moved away from Windows10 to Linux, for privacy and security reasons. So I have to change things up.
Therefore, I can only use BackBlaze B2 solution with rclone (linux terminal program), Synology, DIY NAS, NextCloud (hosted vps or self hosted).
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
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Posts
2,847
Location
Midlands
I wouldn't advise using an external HDD to back up your data.
I'm currently using this option, and I don't like it.

Follow the 3 - 2 - 1 data backup strategy.
3 copies of your data, two of which are local, and 1 off site.

To fix this, my solutions are:
-Switch to Synology or DIY NAS Home Server (more expensive option - your own 2nd computer just to store data, plex, nextcloud etc etc), to backup your data.
-Then it is important to have a backup of your backup.
-BackBlaze is my preferred option - unlimited backups for $5 per month (for windows/macos) - encrypt all data before sending to the cloud backup.

I have just moved away from Windows10 to Linux, for privacy and security reasons. So I have to change things up.
Therefore, I can only use BackBlaze B2 solution with rclone (linux terminal program), Synology, DIY NAS, NextCloud (hosted vps or self hosted).

There will be 3 backups, 2 local and 1 off site - the off site being YouTube. Remember this is solely for YouTube videos and not my personal data, that is taken care of in other ways.

I used to have a NAS and may get another at a later stage, but for my budget right now I have chosen a simple USB solution.

As for Linux from Windows, that's a different discussion I feel.
 
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