What would be the best solution for availability + backup with the drives I have for an images storing server?

[Filingo]

Hello,

 

I am setting up a basic image storing server in my house, so basically a PC with drives that will be accessible from all PCs on the home network as a network drive.

I currently have 2x4TB WD Red Plus and 2x4TB Seagate Ironwolf, and 4x2TB mixed old drives.

What would be the best option if I want to have maximum storage and backup, but also maybe availability (will I need RAID?).

Will I need to split the storage into half? i.e. have 2x4TB+2x2TB as the network drive, and copy the same files always to the other 4 drives? (10TB is enough right now though not sure what to do if more storage will be needed and if I'll be able to to change the configuration of the drives)

I am not sure so I pretty much need help and tips from scratch as to what would be the best option in this case

Thanks

[Electronics Wizardy]

Use something like Unraid that allows mixed drives to ues used and making one big volume. That should give you 18 or 14TB depending on double or single parity with all those drives

[voyager_]

Unraid is the way I would go too. My original server was a windows pc but I didn't care for storage spaces and using the onboard raid was really limiting. With unraid I picked up a 4tb drive for parity at the time since most of my drives were 1-3tb. With unraid your parity drive needs to be bigger or equal to the largest drive in the array. You can also mount drives outside of the array, I do this for a target for my "Linux ISOs". It made things much easier and I could expand as I went. I now have two servers running unraid and just last week I was able to toss in another 8tb to expand the array. I would look at adding a cache drive, writing to an unraid server is roughly 50Mbps because it calculate parity. You can configure only certain shares to use the cache so laptops can use it for faster backups and any desktops can backup overnight. You can also look at plugins like photoprism and owncloud.

[LIGISTX]

I agree, unraid. 

[Filingo]

thanks guys, but unraid would only be for the availability part right?

19 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Use something like Unraid that allows mixed drives to ues used and making one big volume. That should give you 18 or 14TB depending on double or single parity with all those drives

If I have 18 or 14 TB it means I won't have anything for backup right? Or it won't be necessary?

 

I was thinking that in order to actually have a backup I need to have a copy of what's saved, unless the Unraid solves that as well?

[Electronics Wizardy]

50 minutes ago, Filingo said:

thanks guys, but unraid would only be for the availability part right?

If I have 18 or 14 TB it means I won't have anything for backup right? Or it won't be necessary?

 

I was thinking that in order to actually have a backup I need to have a copy of what's saved, unless the Unraid solves that as well?

Yea this is all the main storage, you tupically want to have a backup on a different box, incase the whole box loses its data. 

[Filingo]

4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Yea this is all the main storage, you tupically want to have a backup on a different box, incase the whole box loses its data. 

thank you. I meant that I have those drives available, they won't necessarily be in the same box, I just need to somehow divide them so that I would have both the main storage available and the backup - how would that change the way I need to setup it?

[voyager_]

14 minutes ago, Filingo said:

thank you. I meant that I have those drives available, they won't necessarily be in the same box, I just need to somehow divide them so that I would have both the main storage available and the backup - how would that change the way I need to setup it?

The way I do it is not have two separate machines. My main handles my primary storage, plex, homeassistant, etc... my second backs up the data from the first and runs my security cameras. Critical things like docs, photos, etc... that I can't lose are backed up to google drive. At some point I will probably transition this to backblaze. My main server is all 8tb drives and my second it made up of the drives I built my original from and a couple I had to add to have enough capacity. Thats the best part of unraid. I just toss in a drive as I go.

[Filingo]

59 minutes ago, voyager_ said:

The way I do it is not have two separate machines. My main handles my primary storage, plex, homeassistant, etc... my second backs up the data from the first and runs my security cameras. Critical things like docs, photos, etc... that I can't lose are backed up to google drive. At some point I will probably transition this to backblaze. My main server is all 8tb drives and my second it made up of the drives I built my original from and a couple I had to add to have enough capacity. Thats the best part of unraid. I just toss in a drive as I go.

Nice. I also have 2 spare old PCs that can be used as the main storage and the backup.

 

Both the main storage and the backup PC should be in unraid?

 

Also, how do you copy from the main storage to the backup? Do you have cron job on the backup Pc that is copying the data from the main PC? 

[voyager_]

14 minutes ago, Filingo said:

Nice. I also have 2 spare old PCs that can be used as the main storage and the backup.

 

Both the main storage and the backup PC should be in unraid?

 

Also, how do you copy from the main storage to the backup? Do you have cron job on the backup Pc that is copying the data from the main PC? 

It's really up to you if both use the same OS, I went unraid for both because I can just easily add drives as both grow and I was familiar with it. To syn them I use the same windows vm that runs on the second server that runs my security cameras. I think it's rsync, I would have to look again I set it up a couple years ago and haven't had to change is since. Both Servers are added as network shares and it mirrors the stuff from my main server to the second twice a week. The share on the second server is set to not use the cache drive. I'm not that worried about speed and I have it run at odd hours so it doesn't affect anything and I make sure to have it scheduled on different days then the parity check. I'm sure there are a ton of ways to sync the two machines, letting the windows vm seemed the easiest at the time and this way it's one spot to manage the sync, security cameras, and my ubiquiti devices.