What's the best everyday-use/backup arrangement?

[ornryactor]

When I built this computer last fall, I bought four 250GB SATA300 drives with the intention of creating a RAID array with them. I bought them at different times though, so I already had a functioning computer long before the other drives were ordered. Everything (XP and all my files) are on one drive, Vista RC1 is on the second (not that I use it), and the last two are empty. XP needs to be reinstalled anyway, so this summer, I'm looking to back everything up, reinstall, and possibly reconfigure my hard drives.

I'd initially planned on RAID 10, but have more recently considered RAID 5. However, I would like to have some sort of a reliable, consistent backup solution as part of my setup. I don't know anything about what the best thing to do is, so I'm looking for advice. I own an external eSATA enclosure that I'd like to use in some manner. (Doesn't have to contain a backup drive, but I had assumed it would.) In addition to the 4 drives and one enclosure I own, I would be willing to buy one more drive if needed. (Since RAID 10 needs 4 drives.)

This computer is primarily leisure, but it gets a lot of use. Plenty of media and higher-end games, some internet gaming, music notation, and some GIMP photo creation/editing. I've put a lot of time and effort and a decent amount of money into this machine, and I want to take as good care of my files as I do the physical computer. I kind of want an automatic backup solution, so that I can just set everything up and not have to do anything or mess with stuff unless I need to recover a file, etc.

What is the best idea? RAID 5/10 with an external backup? XP on external and all my files on internal RAID? Leave the 4 internal desks separate? What should I do?

 

[sandmanwn]

Unless you have a hardware based raid controller then skip the raid 5 solution.

Using 4 250 GB drives:
You would need a 500 GB external drive to backup the raid 10 config.
750 GB external drive to backup the raid 5 config.

 

[BowRiver]

Generally RAID isn't much of a backup solution, it's more about continuity of service. A typical monthly-weekly-daily backup plan would require about 20 tapes or hard drives. So you'd have 4 tapes labeled Monday to Thursday, four more tapes (Friday 1-4) and 12 tapes (Jan-Dec) and you'd just cycle through them.

With only four hard drives, you really have to stay on top of things and restore from backup immediately if you notice a file is messed up. If a file goes bad and you don't notice for 2 weeks, your backup will likely be of the corrupted file ...

The easiest (and least reliable) backup plan would be to plug one of your hard drives into the eSATA enclosure before going to bed and have it back up overnight. In the morning, take this hdd to work and put it in your desk drawer next to a second hdd. Take this second hard drive home at night and repeat this cycle. You get _one_ day of off-site backup.

If you can get one more (750G or 500G) and partition it you might be able to use this one for bi-weekly or monthly backup in addition to your daily backup.

 

[qwertycopter]

Bowriver: offsite storage? backup tapes? I think the OP is looking for a home solution, not enterprise level.

I think this would be something to consider:

Setup the RAID10. This provides a performance boost and you can suffer a single drive failure without data loss.

Buy a 750GB drive for the eSATA enclosure and use it for backup. You really only need to backup your personal files. Programs can be reinstalled. Do a full backup of the folders containing your files once every other week. Each night, do an incremental backup(backs up only the data changed since that last full backup) of these folders. Between your full backup and incremental backups, you should be able to recover any file up to two weeks prior the data loss/corruption. That is good enough for a home setup.

And if that isn't enough, buy a $30 DVD burner. Backup your static files to optical medium and they should be safe for atleast 3 years (suggested lifespan of a DVD-R). Static files would be like your digital photos, music, etc, files that rarely change, if ever. You can store these discs in a fireproof homesafe or lockbox.

 

[alcattle]

What software do you recommend for hand's off backups(daily ones)

 

[babaghan]

I use Symantec's Norton 360 for daily shut-yer-brain-off backups.

 

[ornryactor]

Qwertycopter: Thanks for the great response. Since I don't know much about home backup, I have a couple n00b questions for anyone to answer. First, why a 750GB drive? I guess I only have 750GB if I'm using RAID 5. With RAID 10, I have 500GB, and with 4 separate disks, I have 1TB. I'm just unclear why 750 and not something else.

EDIT: After looking at 750GB drives and finding that the cheapest OEM drive out there is still $240, I'm hoping that 500GB will be just fine. Those run about $120 on a good day, and that's still kinda steep for a college student.

Second, You're saying to do a full backup twice a month, and nightly incremental backups, but they sound like they're on different partitions or something. If I do a full backup tonight, then a file gets corrupted tomorrow morning, and I do the incremental backup tomorrow night, wouldn't the incremental backup overwrite the orginal clean file with the newly corrupt one? So do I use two partitions to do this?

Babghan- Norton 360 looks awesome, but I'm a college student and can't afford anything that requires a subscription. Is there any standalone software that does similar things? I'm really just looking for a quality, user-friendly backup tool. If it does anything beyond that, it's a bonus.

 

[babaghan]

With Norton 360, the default location for backups is offsite storage (read: subscription $$$). It's very easy to change the location of backups - internal hard drive, external hard drive, optical disk, or offsite. I choose internal storage at no charge

 

[ornryactor]

So if I elect to backup my data to my own hard disks, then the $70 is all I'll ever pay for the software? That's a better deal. I'll have to see if I can get educational pricing...

Does anyone else have software to suggest, in case I can't get Norton 360?

 

[qwertycopter]

and with 4 separate disks, I have 1TB.

Not recommended if you are serious about protecting your data. One thing to keep in mind is that any redundancy solution is going to cost you GB's. But what you gain is peace of mind.

Second, You're saying to do a full backup twice a month, and nightly incremental backups, but they sound like they're on different partitions or something. If I do a full backup tonight, then a file gets corrupted tomorrow morning, and I do the incremental backup tomorrow night, wouldn't the incremental backup overwrite the orginal clean file with the newly corrupt one? So do I use two partitions to do this?

Let me clear this one up. This does depend on your backup software (sorry, I only have experience with enterprise level solutions.. so I don't have a suggestion for you ).

Say you only run a full backups (no incremental). That full backup remains there in its entirety until the next full backup in two weeks. If you suffer data loss between backups, you lose any new data that was created after the most recent full backup.

That's where incremental backups come into play. In addition to the full backups you do a nightly incremental backup which looks at your most recent full backup and compares it to the data currently on your RAID. It finds the differences and only makes copies of the differences. The next night it looks at changes that have occurred since the previous incremental backup, and makes copies of those changes.

So here's the beauty: you can recover a file (or indeed ALL files) to any state within that two week time frame. The recovery process uses the full backup as a starting point. But it can also pull changes from incremental backups. So you can recover a certain file as it was one day ago, two days ago, three days ago, etc by using both the full backup and the incremental backups (in a two week period you would accumulate 1 full backup and 13 incremental backups.. that is why I suggested the 750GB. 500 for the full and 250 for incrementals).

So I hope you can sorta see now what I'm saying. The full backup is all your data and the incrementals are much much smaller, only the data that have been added since the most recent full backup (stored incrementally day after day) .

I think this is your best solution because:
- A full backup takes a long time
- A full backup takes a LOT of space; you couldn't store more than one full backup at a time.. that's not good in terms of data recovery
- Incrementals will provide longer data recovery periods plus multiple restore points AND will put less wear and tear on the backup drive overall.
- Incrementals take up a heck of a lot less space overall considering the data recovery periods available (for a comparison, imagine how much space 2 weeks worth of full backups would take up! And most of that data will be repeated over and over amongst the backups.. aka wasted space!)

You may find that 13 days of incrementals won't fit in 250 GB. In that case you might do a full backup once a week and do 6 incrementals the other nights.

I'd also like to reemphasize that doing backups-to-disk is never a complete solution in data protection. A RAID protects data on-the-fly by being able to suffer 1 (or 2 in a RAID6) disk failures without data loss. It is unlikely that more disks than that will fail simultaneously; that is where the protection comes in to play. RAID is built around the idea that one of your disks is going to eventually fail: how can you eliminate data loss immediately following a disk failure. The next step is disk backup where you protect data in the short term (series of weeks). We already discussed that. The third step is long term storage. An example would be the DVD-RW drive to store your static files.