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Hello collective singletrack mind
I need to create some level of redundancy with my data storage. Currently I have a mac, nas drive and external drive (kept in a separate location). The external drive is nearing its limit so I need to decide what to do next.
The nas has copies of all my personal files, Aperture vault etc whereas the external drive I do a monthly time machine backup.
This gives double redundancy on the most important data, ie photos and video. Now with the external drive at its limit am I best to continue with this configuration or should I be looking for some more up to date solution. Thanks and please keep advise relatively basic, I am not up on all the RAID configurations!!
What you have seems pretty solid - Depends on how much storage you have I guess but Dropbox or similar?
As above, what you have works and offers up multiple recovery options for your data in case of one failing.
You could maybe move to using another NAS for your time machine backups but the flexibility of being able to lock the removable drive away in a safe is always good.
I was thinking on adding another NAS drive on the same network but in a different building, that means I am more likely to do the time machine backups. Only problem ,the mac is wirelessly connected and the transfer speeds are soooo slow to the current WD Nas drive (which don't get on well with macs). Maybe best just but a cheap external drive and use it occasionally
If you've filled a NAS up I assume you have 100's of Gb of data if not Tb's?
Anything like dropbox is going to take weeks to upload the data to.
Decide how much data you can afford/want to lose.
If it's a weeks worth then an external drive backup weekly and offsite is enough. If you need more frequent then I'd probably still stick with external drive but just have 2 or 3 that use in rotation.
Keep the NAS as a local backup in case anything fails on the main pc.
My main NAS ( QNAP 219 ) lives in my Living room, with a cheaper Qnap 212 living at my parents. They are set to sync each of my most important data collections each week ( videos, music, documents, photos, scripts, backup of my parent's stuff ).
Maybe you could move the WD Nas to being remote, and get a Qnap/Synology that can be your local NAS, get them syncing data, and Bob's your uncle.
Depends how paranoid you are. Lets assume your uber paranoid and have things that you really can't recreate....
1.Only having one offsite backup is not really enough. Worst thing is that when you bring that one backup onsite you are vulnerable, all the data in one building. You really need at least one valid copy off site at all times. Two drives sorts this, use them alternately.
2.As you back thinks up, you could well be backup up corrupt things. Imagine you have a virus. It junks all your important files, just before you plug in your offsite backup. You then overwrite your backup with trashed files. All you data storage sites are corrupted. You really need archives as well as backups. Two drives half covers this base, in the fact that as you backup one, the other one is not altered. Give a bit of breathing space, time to see things have been corrupted. But in reality you need real archives, copies that are not altered.
I could go on to talk about locating backups in geographically similar areas, but even I'm not that paranoid.
For the record, in my experience, most people backup up far far too many things. The more you backup, generally, the harder it is. You only really need things that are unique, and irreplaceable.