Backing up drives - Image clone vs files?

[Gershy13]

Hi,

 

I have 3 drives in my system that i want to backup

M Media - WD Blue 1tb (about 600gb used) (contains some pictures, videos, music, and programs and other random stuff)

P Pictures - Segate 2tb Barracuda (about 930gb used) (contains pictures and videos only)

C Windows Installation - Samsung 840 evo 120gb (about 90gb used) (just the windows installation with some software installed)

 

As a backup drive, all i currently have is one segate backup plus 2tb.

 

Im trying to decide what will be the best way to backup my computer? Should i image the drives or should i just copy the files over to the backup drive.

Ideally i would do both, but i dont have enough storage on the backup drive to do that...

 

Thoughts?

 

 

Thanks

Gershy13

[voyager_]

Alot of it depends on how you want to restore them. I prefer disk images for my OS and regular backups for my remaining storage. Many backup programs and disk image programs compress files. This will help with your storage limitations. Another option is to replace that 2tb drive with a 3 or 4 tb drive.

 

I have two different disk images for each system. The first is an initial install with drivers and some software to allow me to quickly recover a system to a default state. The second I take intermittently a a quick recovery to a prev. state. The rest of my files back up to my server weekly.

[seagate_surfer]

With backups, the tried-and-true method is the 3-2-1 method: keep 3 copies of your data, 2 local but on different mediums, and 1 offsite in case of disaster. You've already got what seems to be the drives you need to do this because you've got multiple internal drives and an external backup drive (if you'd like to be extra safe, you could go for an extra/ larger capacity external drive). 

As far as how to do it, there are many methods, some people like the convenience of a software that automates their backups and takes most of the legwork out of the process for them. We do offer a free limited version of Acronis' popular backup software, ours is dubbed DiscWizard.

[Gershy13]

5 hours ago, seagate_surfer said:

With backups, the tried-and-true method is the 3-2-1 method: keep 3 copies of your data, 2 local but on different mediums, and 1 offsite in case of disaster. You've already got what seems to be the drives you need to do this because you've got multiple internal drives and an external backup drive (if you'd like to be extra safe, you could go for an extra/ larger capacity external drive). 

As far as how to do it, there are many methods, some people like the convenience of a software that automates their backups and takes most of the legwork out of the process for them. We do offer a free limited version of Acronis' popular backup software, ours is dubbed DiscWizard.

 

6 hours ago, voyager_ said:

Alot of it depends on how you want to restore them. I prefer disk images for my OS and regular backups for my remaining storage. Many backup programs and disk image programs compress files. This will help with your storage limitations. Another option is to replace that 2tb drive with a 3 or 4 tb drive.

 

I have two different disk images for each system. The first is an initial install with drivers and some software to allow me to quickly recover a system to a default state. The second I take intermittently a a quick recovery to a prev. state. The rest of my files back up to my server weekly.

ok thanks, i think as i dont have enough space im going to go with just copying the files over for the media and pictures drives, and imaging the windows drive.

 

Eventually im going to turn my old computer that is laying around doing nothing into a NAS, which will then do automatic image backups (and files for the pictures drive if i can spare the space).

 

Any ideas what raid would be best for redundancy?

[voyager_]

16 hours ago, Gershy13 said:

 

ok thanks, i think as i dont have enough space im going to go with just copying the files over for the media and pictures drives, and imaging the windows drive.

 

Eventually im going to turn my old computer that is laying around doing nothing into a NAS, which will then do automatic image backups (and files for the pictures drive if i can spare the space).

 

Any ideas what raid would be best for redundancy?

Raid 5 is often a good option for many people. It offers single drive failure but good read/write performance and many mother boards and add on cards support it. If performance isn't a primary factor you should consider using something like FreeNas or Unraid.

 

I personally went with Unraid for the drive flexibility. Drive do not have to match and can be added individually as needed. The limiting factor is the size of your parity drive, no drive can be larger than the parity drive. The downsize is the write speed from the array. If I have my cache drive disabled I can typically write to the array at around 40-50Mb/s. Read speeds are limited by the individual drive that you are accessing. The write speed limitation is easy to correct with a cache drive. I use a couple of SSD's and can write to the system as fast as the network connection will allow.

[Gershy13]

1 hour ago, voyager_ said:

Raid 5 is often a good option for many people. It offers single drive failure but good read/write performance and many mother boards and add on cards support it. If performance isn't a primary factor you should consider using something like FreeNas or Unraid.

 

I personally went with Unraid for the drive flexibility. Drive do not have to match and can be added individually as needed. The limiting factor is the size of your parity drive, no drive can be larger than the parity drive. The downsize is the write speed from the array. If I have my cache drive disabled I can typically write to the array at around 40-50Mb/s. Read speeds are limited by the individual drive that you are accessing. The write speed limitation is easy to correct with a cache drive. I use a couple of SSD's and can write to the system as fast as the network connection will allow.

personally i dont mind speed being slow, as long as its not stupidly slow... as its just going to be backing up...

I would like to run something that would be free or cheap, unraid is paid isnt it?

What about storage... how much would i lose if i were to use raid 5?

[voyager_]

40 minutes ago, Gershy13 said:

personally i dont mind speed being slow, as long as its not stupidly slow... as its just going to be backing up...

I would like to run something that would be free or cheap, unraid is paid isnt it?

What about storage... how much would i lose if i were to use raid 5?

Unraid is paid. With raid 5 if you have 3 x 4 terabyte drives you will have 8 terabytes of usable space.

[Gershy13]

On 17/03/2018 at 1:59 PM, voyager_ said:

Unraid is paid. With raid 5 if you have 3 x 4 terabyte drives you will have 8 terabytes of usable space.

i heard that unraid has a free version with up to 3 drives?

[vanished]

I would recommend an image for your OS drive since there's no way you could just "restore and go" with any other method, but for the rest of your data, copying as files makes much more sense.  It would allow you to keep different versions over time without using too much extra space, and would make it easy to access them when needed.