Is it good idea to use a nas drive for a backup?

[Mad153]

Hello,

Our family time capsule is porbably dead and i don't really trust it anymore if it isn't (it's about 10 years old).

I'm also sick of tyring to find my external drive which is so definitley going to die before my ssd does.

so i need a replacment, and i felt like maybe setting up a nas with a few TB drives in a flavour of raid.

i've understood that "RAID is not a backup", but i  assume this is referring to using something like raid 1 as the only place where some data is.

(I could be wrong, please correct me!)

so is my idea a good idea or am i just completely off?

I'm intending to backup files which aren't mission critical, but nicer to not have to redo - eg: not having to reinstall windows and redownload everything if my SSD goes, and a few files that i would rather not copy out again but i don't need 4 backups of.

also, how big should i make the raid? my parents use time machine and i use EaseUS Todo backup. (we each have about 1.5TB)

thanks!

[Master Disaster]

NAS for backup is ideal assuming you do it correctly. Use a RAID method and filesystem that supports rebuilding the array through drive redundancy and if anything goes wrong with one drive you can swap it out for a new one, the array will rebuild and you're back up with no data loss.

 

You're correct in your assumption about RAID 1 (Stripe), if anything goes wrong with any drive in the array the entire thing is toast, everything gone, do not pass go, do not collect £200. RAID 1 should only be used for data you really don't care about losing.

 

I believe RAID 5 or RAID 6 are the preferred methods for backup but honestly I'm not the best person to offer advice on that as its something I've never messed with so I'll wait for someone more qualified to answer properly.

[Mad153]

after some research - i think i will repourpose my fx8350 that i have lying around in an unused machine and some drives off pc part picker.

I assume i will use UNraid and raid 5 as i plan to only have 3 drives.

also i'm going to use some old non-ecc ram as ecc is about double for mobo and the sticks and my data is not mission critical, just a nice to have backup.

someone please correct me if this is a terrible idea.

[GDRRiley]

11 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

NAS for backup is ideal assuming you do it correctly. Use a RAID method and filesystem that supports rebuilding the array through drive redundancy and if anything goes wrong with one drive you can swap it out for a new one, the array will rebuild and you're back up with no data loss.

 

You're correct in your assumption about RAID 1 (Stripe), if anything goes wrong with any drive in the array the entire thing is toast, everything gone, do not pass go, do not collect £200. RAID 1 should only be used for data you really don't care about losing.

 

I believe RAID 5 or RAID 6 are the preferred methods for backup but honestly I'm not the best person to offer advice on that as its something I've never messed with so I'll wait for someone more qualified to answer properly.

raid 0 is stripe. raid 1 is mirror.

[Nick7]

3 hours ago, rrubberr said:

RAID 5 and 6 are terrible. These are "parity" redundancy methods, which means you can lose either 1 or 2 disks respectively, but rebuilding your third disk (or n disk) is a hassle, takes for ever, and it has a nasty tendency of frying the other drives in the array.

 

Invest in a quality RAID card from LSI. Use RAID1.

Please don't spread FUD.

 

RAID5 is an issue with larger drives, and double disk errors do happen.

For home use, it may be fine though - however, you should have a proper backup too.

 

RAID6 is another story. Working with storage systems, I have not heard of anyone losing their data due to RAID6 triple disk error (you need to lose 3 disks to lose data).

I did hear of people losing data due to RAID5 or RAID1 though.

While rebuild is longish on RAID6, it has additional parity, which solves issue with larger disk drives.

Also, all storage systems (small and enterprise ones) advise to use RAID6 - so I'd say it's fairly safe to say RAID6 is fine & better (for reliability) than RAID1. Performance-wise, yes - RAID1 is faster.

 

Another misinformation is 'frying disks on rebuild'. What you think happens with RAID1? Yes, you need to read whole (source) disk to make a copy to new one. So same issue may occur in this scenario too. Only difference is less chance of it happening, as only one disk is used as source opposed to 5, 7 or even more in RAID5 (or 6).

And on another note - disk that dies during rebuild is one that was already hanging on a thread and was about to die. This is also a reason why proper RAID controllers use patrol reads.

[Mad153]

2 hours ago, Nick7 said:

however, you should have a proper backup too.

What do you suggest? This sort of was my solution for a proper backup

[Nick7]

1 hour ago, Mad153 said:

What do you suggest? This sort of was my solution for a proper backup

I suppose you misunderstood me.

I was talking about situation where you keep original data on RAID1/5/6.

 

In case of backup, RAID5 is basically enough. If it fails, you can backup data again, but still - chance of that happening is really low (much higher probability data will be gone by user error).

Archive - data you need to keep long is different story - for that, you should really have 2nd or even 3rd location/device where you want to keep data.

 

For example: I keep my family photos in 3 different locations on 3 different devices.

[Mad153]

Just now, Nick7 said:

I suppose you misunderstood me.

I was talking about situation where you keep original data on RAID1/5/6.

 

In case of backup, RAID5 is basically enough. If it fails, you can backup data again, but still - chance of that happening is really low (much higher probability data will be gone by user error).

Archive - data you need to keep long is different story - for that, you should really have 2nd or even 3rd location/device where you want to keep data.

 

For example: I keep my family photos in 3 different locations on 3 different devices.

yeah i was going to use this as more of a so i don't have to reinstall windows and the rest of my small files which i'm not fond of, but it's nothing like family pictures - thats already on the cloud.

do you suggest unraid? I don't have ECC ram and can't really afford it and apparently FreeNAS really likes ECC ram and assumes you are using it.

[Mad153]

7 hours ago, rrubberr said:

Invest in a quality RAID card from LSI. Use RAID1.

to be clear - i'm mostly storing the equivalent of cat memes - nice to have, nice to not have to find again, but it's not OMG the cats are gone I'm going to die...

is a RAID card really necessary? what benefit does it have over a sata controller? I don't mind too much if a few files in my backup are corrupted.

7 hours ago, rrubberr said:

but rebuilding your third disk (or n disk) is a hassle, takes for ever

it seems unlikely that in my many years of using a computer that both my primary and my backup fail at the same time, considering i've never had a catastrophic data loss incident before.

[Nick7]

5 minutes ago, Mad153 said:

do you suggest unraid? I don't have ECC ram and can't really afford it and apparently FreeNAS really likes ECC ram and assumes you are using it.

FreeNAS doesn't *need* ECC RAM. It's myth that's been discussed quite often (such as also 1GB RAM/1TB HDD, which is also false). ECC is nice to have, but not required, especially for home use.

While here unRAID is quite hyped, I - personally - prefer FreeNAS.

However, any one you choose will be completely fine. And to be honest, for my home use, I made it custom - ZFS with RAIDZ1 and samba, while using same PC as my HTPC with Kodi, and some additional stuff on it, running Linux.