Storage advice

[Gibraltar]

Hello,

 

I need advice on storage solutions and backing them up.

At the moment all my videos and other storage heavy files are kept on 4X 1 terabyte seagate hard drives, not solid state. Personally these are a hassle for me to deal with because I have to go through each one to find what I need.

This is where smart people advice is wanted. I want to have them all on 1 device that I can plug in, so possibly a higher storage hardrive, or maybe have it so I can connect wireless to it. I'd also like advice on how to back it up so I lower the risk of losing everything. From what I've learned from watching these videos is what I might want is a RAID or NAS system, however I only want it accessible to me and I'm not sure how to go about backing up or redundancy.

 

I seriously appreciate any help given, I know the basics of computers and thats it.

[PineyCreek]

Easiest way? Get an external hard drive, copy everything over there and use that to avoid having to search multiple drives. Keep your 4 x 1TB drives as backup.  Or get two 4 TB drives, put them in RAID1 or use Windows Storage Spaces. Heck, get 5TB or 6TB instead so you have extra space.

[Gibraltar]

25 minutes ago, PineyCreek said:

Easiest way? Get an external hard drive, copy everything over there and use that to avoid having to search multiple drives. Keep your 4 x 1TB drives as backup.  Or get two 4 TB drives, put them in RAID1 or use Windows Storage Spaces. Heck, get 5TB or 6TB instead so you have extra space.

Well, I live in fear of hard drives no longer working, this has happened a few times actually, so I tend to run my files through an anti-virus software before I put them on, I even had a big 8 tb that i had everything on alongside the 1 tb, but that crashed or whatever its called and the computer places around me couldn't restore it, and what i fail to understand is, that rarely got moved, so it couldn't have been from a drop or something similar.

 

I truly do appreciate the advice, but I also feel this is a good point to start learning a bit more about computers and storage, you know? start with something as basic as storage upgrades and do it with the help of people who know this stuff and are willing to help.

[seagate_surfer]

Hey OP, first off we want to thank you for your support with the drives you've currently got.

As far as backups, the most widely recommended backup strategy is called the 3-2-1 method:

Keep 3 copies of your data - 2 locally but on different mediums - with 1 stored offsite in case of disaster.

The thing you'll have to keep in mind with RAID, & forgive us because you will hear this often in forums, is that RAID is not a backup. RAID is designed to prevent system downtime when you simply can't afford the time/money that it being down means. Picture that you own/run an online business. The server that runs credit card transactions for this business simply can't afford to be down for a long period of time due to something like a hard drive failing, because this means money being burned in your pocket. That's where a situation for RAID comes in. It allows the system to keep running while you swap out a drive and rebuild the data structure around the new one so that the situation is relatively harmless in the bigger picture. The complication with backups this way is that, when you're talking about rebuilding multiple TB's of data bit by bit, errors can happen as part of the rebuild process which then lead to corrupted data. This is different than having separate, fully independently intact copies of the same data on different mediums or storage devices.

For that reason, it may be a good idea to come up with a solution that allows you to have copies of your drive in your internal computer system, that backs up to a large external drive, ideally one which you then store at another location for that last step in the method.

[enforcerdestroyer]

One thing you can do is sort the things you need throughout the drives, for example one drive has the video editing stuff, then you rename the partition as something like "Video stuff" for easier use, the other drive can contain video games (just an example, I don't know what you really use or do) etc, that way if you sort everything properly, you should be finding yourself in less situations where you're looking for something and just can't find it. That's one way to sort things throughout the partitions. For the backup, it's best that you get a large capacity external hard drive for backing up everything. I'm not the best when it comes to the first question though, so you should follow the instructions of the people who posted before me (and after me if there's going to be anyone).

[PineyCreek]

On 5/21/2018 at 8:32 AM, seagate_surfer said:

Hey OP, first off we want to thank you for your support with the drives you've currently got.

As far as backups, the most widely recommended backup strategy is called the 3-2-1 method:

Keep 3 copies of your data - 2 locally but on different mediums - with 1 stored offsite in case of disaster.

The thing you'll have to keep in mind with RAID, & forgive us because you will hear this often in forums, is that RAID is not a backup. RAID is designed to prevent system downtime when you simply can't afford the time/money that it being down means. Picture that you own/run an online business. The server that runs credit card transactions for this business simply can't afford to be down for a long period of time due to something like a hard drive failing, because this means money being burned in your pocket. That's where a situation for RAID comes in. It allows the system to keep running while you swap out a drive and rebuild the data structure around the new one so that the situation is relatively harmless in the bigger picture. The complication with backups this way is that, when you're talking about rebuilding multiple TB's of data bit by bit, errors can happen as part of the rebuild process which then lead to corrupted data. This is different than having separate, fully independently intact copies of the same data on different mediums or storage devices.

For that reason, it may be a good idea to come up with a solution that allows you to have copies of your drive in your internal computer system, that backs up to a large external drive, ideally one which you then store at another location for that last step in the method.

That's....a good point.  In my earlier message to OP I only gave what I thought was the easiest way.  It does bear reiterating: backups and RAID are two different things.  RAID1 would be a local in-computer backup protecting you from drive failure, but corruption, malware, etc. will just be mirrored.  So you @Gibraltar need to decide how much you want to spend and what exactly you want.  You've got RAID1 and Windows Storage spaces for hard drive redundancy, but it would be good to have a separate drive as a backup as well. Example, make your backup, scan it, then disconnect the drive from the computer.  Then you have a local backup that's network/electrically segregated from the PC in the event of catastrophic hardware failure.  To further protect against burglary or natural disasters, etc., you'd also want an offsite backup.