NAS / Storage method question

[Zento]

Hi! A friend of mine is a professional photographer, and is getting the new iMac Pro. At the same time he wants to get a NAS and work off that, which means everything will be stored on the NAS.
Although i recommended running it in Raid 1, he specifically wanted 1x3.5TB Seagate Wolf Pro for "active use", and automatically backing up that "active use" drive individually on 2 other 3.5 TB drives. Which means he's going to have 2 backups. Is this doable with any of the raid configurations, if not is there a script to run that automatically backs up all the content on the drive at specific times?

Please ask if I need to clarify something.

[Drak3]

It's possible to use multiple RAID configs in FreeNAS, or just have multiple RAID0/5/6/10 boxes.

[tikker]

Well RAID is not an alteranative to making backups, just redundancy in case of drive failure (aside from RAID 0). So if having backups is the main priority, get a script or something similar that backups the required data once in a while.

Perhaps use two drives for a RAID 1 and the third one as backup?

[Guest]

RAID is NOT a backup. If the system he is running it all on fails, or if there is a power surge etc, all the data will be lost. You could easily make that strategy work with scripts to copy files across, or using multiple drive mirroring, but I would suggest another solution. 

 

RAID 1: Two of the 3.5TB drives. 

Cold Storage Backup: Another of the 3.5TB drives, that you can update periodically, potentially via a hot swap drive tray in the front of the case. 

 

It is also worth considering a cloud backup as well, especially if this data is very important. 

 

This can be achieved by using Freenas (I would recommend ZFS), or pretty much any other NAS solution. 

[zombienerd]

Raid 1 doesn't care how many drives are attatched, it copies the data to all attached drives. 

[Zento]

As i don't think there's a "right way" to do this, i won't mark a solution. But i'll be taking all your input and looking into how to set up the different options you guys gave me, and then with my friend come to a solution as to how he wants to do it! Thanks a lot for all the input guys!

[tikker]

18 minutes ago, Zento said:

As i don't think there's a "right way" to do this, i won't mark a solution. But i'll be taking all your input and looking into how to set up the different options you guys gave me, and then with my friend come to a solution as to how he wants to do it! Thanks a lot for all the input guys!

Indeed, many routes lead to Rome  I think the main point made here is that you should not go for RAID when a backup is really what you want.