Storage solution.. Help! RAID???

[JohnnTBP]

Hi Guys, This is my first post here, Thought it would be a good place to start! 

 

My situation, I have a video production business, and my archive is starting to get out of hand, I currently have about 15 external drives plugged in via USB3 hubs 24/7 and each one is backed up to a portable usb drive which i keep offsite. 

So all up i have 30+ Drives that i have to keep track of, Data size is about 25tbs

 

What I'm looking at doing is purchasing a Synology  disk station with 8x6tb drives for example in raid 6, Giving me 36tb of possible storage?? 

This is fine, As i should get a speed boost from single drives?  and plenty of storage to grow into (for another 6months... ) 

 

the issue is backing up, I have started using crash plan, but i don't think its realistic as i have been backing up for about 6 months and am not even half way there yet, 

Ideally i would purchase a separate raid unit and just mirror them? keep one offsite? 

but i would rather utilise all the external drives i currently have as backups until I'm in a position to splash another 5k on a second unit, 

Getting to the question, Is there  a automatic way that i can do daily backups from a large raid 6 unit onto a range of individual 2-4tb external drives? they are mostly just seagate external drives via usb.. 

 

Any input of suggestions would be much appreciated, Main goal is to have fast redundant storage onsite, but also have a offsite backup in the extreme case of a fire/robbery.. 

ill would also look at having a Raid0 working drive that backups daily onto the onsite raid also, just for the boost in speed for current projects. 

 

Thanks guys! Hope this is a simple topic that I'm just unaware of! 

 

Cheers

[F4S4K4N]

Unless you can afford a gigabit internet connection, all cloud options are not realistic (as well as a offsite storage server). I feel you're pain because i had to solve the exact same issue a year or so ago.

 

We had about 30TB (now 40TB) of files going back to 1996. These were stored on a Fiber Channel SAN across a few enclosures. Off site backups were more or less non-existent. We ended up buying two new enclosures and making them into compressed / deduped ZFS pools. (don't use dedup unless you have a lot of similar data). This allowed us to take toughly 40TB of data compress it down to 26TB. Then we would use ZFS send to copy the dataset over to a second enclosure. Once a day i go in an take the disks out of the second enclosure and put a spare set in. I then take those disks home in an anti-static pelican case. The next day i switch the disks between the pelican case and the backup enclosure.