Upgrading personal mass storge

[Mark floating in Space]

Hey guys,

 

I would like to upgrade my personal storage solution. I currently have two 1TB WD blues for my mass storage and I sync them up once a week with freefilesync (http://www.freefilesync.org/). Awesome mass storage solution I know xD. Now I want to increase both the capacity and the reliablity.

 

I had this in mind:
3TB fast and silent main HDD

3TB slow but very reliable HDD for weekly backup

3TB slow but very reliable HDD in another Desktop on the same network for monthly backup

3TB HDD that i just keep off site for yearly backup

 

Whyat do you think of that system?
Can you please make suggestions for the drives? I wanted to go with WD but found articles that say they have freaking huge failure rates... then I wanted to go with HGST but I have read that their drives tend to be loud...

What is the easiest way to automatically sync files over the network with another pc?

 

Thank you for your answers in advance (=

[Naeaes]

No RAID?

[Guest]

Do you need all of those drives? 

[Guest]

Also if you're worried about WD and want to try something else, Seagate is another option and they're a massive competitor. I wouldn't worry about WD failing though. I've used Seagate's 2.5 inch HDD for my old laptop and I constantly beat the crap out of it with massive file transfers and OS reinstalls and they still come out great. 

[trag1c]

I would probably go with 2 3TB (or any other capacity for that matter) drives in a RAID 1 mirror configuration redundant storage then a offsite cloud service or another set of drives in the same config offsite.

 

I am currently running 5x4TB Seagate NAS drives (soon to add another 3 of the same model) in my development server and I am perfectly happy with them as well they tend to be cheaper alternative's to the WD counter parts. Not sure about new HGST drives but I have a 320GB Hitachi (They're are now HGST) drive from 2008 running perfectly fine. 

[Mark floating in Space]

15 minutes ago, Naeaes said:

No RAID?

 

7 minutes ago, trag1c said:

I would probably go with 2 3TB (or any other capacity for that matter) drives in a RAID 1 mirror configuration redundant storage then a offsite cloud service or another set of drives in the same config offsite.

 

Well raid doesn't protect against anything but drive failure... You have got slower write performance, twice the noise, and if you accidently delet a file you are shit out of luck. I have never fully understood the appeal of a RAID 1 setup if you aren't heavly reliant on 100% uptime. Furthermore, I consider the RAID itself as a failure point when it is made by someone inexperienced like me.

 

20 minutes ago, IAmLamp said:

Do you need all of those drives? 

Well not really. I just want to make sure I don't lose anything...

 

13 minutes ago, trag1c said:

 then a offsite cloud service

Can you recommend one? Every now and again you ear that one service got hacked and I am not too keen on continously paying for my backup so free would be nice^^

[Naeaes]

3 minutes ago, That_Linus_fan_guy said:

Well raid doesn't protect against anything but drive failure... You have got slower write performance, twice the noise, and if you accidently delet a file you are shit out of luck. I have never fully understood the appeal of a RAID 1 setup if you aren't heavly reliant on 100% uptime. Furthermore, I consider the RAID itself as a failure point when it is made by someone inexperienced like me.

Obviously no single solution covers every possible scenario. You really need a combination of at least a few.Your approach of copying stuff over is a great thing to do, but your minimum interval is 1 week. A HW failure could destroy a weeks worth of data. Depending on what you do, that can be acceptable but for me, it definitely would not be. My business would be toast if I had to re-do a weeks worth of work (assuming it'd equate to pushing my delivery dates by one week) 

I personally have all but my OS and a few softwares on a RAID 1 array internally. I've set up a scrip to copy everything new over to my other computer every time I boot up or shut down and once every hour in between. My personal data I also copy over to Dropbox and Google Drive but my work data has no off-site backups (as requested by a number of my customers).