Backing up Nas devices?

[Ocelaris]

Just curious what other people are using to back up their home nas boxes. I have a 4 year old CentOS box running 6x1TB drives in Raid 5, then 2x 2TB drives for backup (not using ALL the space of the raid5 at the moment). I'm thinking of retiring the old system, but if you end up having a 10TB + system what do people do realistically to back it up, a whole separate raid for just backups? Basically by the time you're done you're losing more than half your drive space JUST for backups, i.e. if you get 4x 4TB drives, that means you get another 4x 4TB drives to back that up... I'm just not comfortable with running ONLY a raid without equal disks backing that up, because in the 4 years I've probably replaced 8 drives safely but once I lost 2 at once and had to rebuild the array from backups once; without those backup drives (nightly) I would have lost everything. I have email alerts set up for backups and smart monitoring alerts. 

 

Creative ideas? Tape System etc...? 

[Blade of Grass]

I know alot of people use online backup systems like CrashPlan, but personally I don't actually backup the backup of my data.

My home server does a few different functions, but really it's being used as a backup system for my computers and to store media. Media can easily be downloaded back from where I purchased it, and I can easily re-backup my computers to it if there is a failure. 

As my server is a backup of my devices, the only logical plan would to do offsite backups, but sadly I don't have the bandwidth to do that. 

 

My suggestion would be to look into online backup services (if you have internet that can handle it).

[ChineseChef]

I have looked into this issue myself a bit, since I have roughly 45TB of data at the moment.  The main problem you run into is that as a home user, the cost usually isn't worth it.  Just having the HDDs and system to hold them is usually expensive enough, and essentially, the only way to actually have a backup of something is to have a 1:1 copy of it.  Even the cheapest route of a home grown setup still leaves you at buying a ton of HDDs.  Online solutions are an option if you have the bandwidth, but it’s rare for both you and your online storage place to have good bandwidth.  The cheapest route at the moment is 4TB hdds (0.03 cents per GB).  So, essentially, you just get an enclosure that will hold enough of them to hold all your data, and either hook it to a system/server or build a system around it (case with lots of HDD slots and a mobo with lots of sata ports). 

 

For me personally?  I don't worry about total data loss.  If it happens, I will cry, ask God "WHY ME!!!??!!??!??", cry a little more.  Then rebuild and just redownload everything.  Anything I have that is actually important to me is stored in like 3 separate places, but that data could easily fit on a single DVD.  The bulk of my data is media of various types, and would really be no true loss should it get destroyed.  So my only real concern is for indivual HDD failure, which is resolved with raid for me.

 

Tape systems aren't really worth it for the home user.  The cost of the tapes is nice and cheap, but the recorders can be expensive and very very slow.