Help me determine a drive/backup strategy....

[TWG1572]

I have a mismatch of external storage devices and am trying to figure out what the best strategy here is...

1) I have a five year old laptop that is limping along. 150GB drive, 50GB free. I have about 60GB in music, pictures, and videos I would not want to lose. That is growing relatively quickly with the children at six months and three years.

The laptop is on the way out in the next 12 months, and will be replaced by a desktop. The drives on that should solve my primary storage constraints. My plan is to do a homebuild, just because I'd like to learn how to do it. Probably will run some sort of RAID 1 configuration.

2) I've been running Carbonite and backing up pictures and docs.

3) I have an Western Digital 1GB external USB drive that I have used soly as a backup drive. Windows backup keeps failing on me, so I've used Acronis.

4) I purchased a Seagate 2TB NAS last week, thinking that was the solution to my space issues and aging HD on my laptop. Plus the cloud features would be nice for the grandparents and pictures. Unfortunately, it has to be wireless access since I don't have ethernet through the house. I put my pictures, etc on there but is is very laggy. So laggy it's annoying. I could still return this drive if I wanted to.

I can't move the router closer to my main living room to enhance the connection, since only one outlet in my house is wired for DSL and that is in the basement. The service guy said the prior owner did it because the house wiring was such that I need a "home run" to get proper signal strength.

I really have more questions than answers at this point. It seems like having two backup drives and Carbonite is overkill.

I'm a bit of a networking newbie, so hopefully have provided enough info to get thoughts going. Any ideas on piecing my current hardware together into some sort of coherent storage/backup configuration? Losing this data would be heartbreaking, to say the least.

 

[uc50ic4more]

Originally Posted By: TWG1572
It seems like having two backup drives and Carbonite is overkill.


I think that's just right: a drive you keep regular backups on, possibly even persistently connected to your main computer to mitigate against you messing something up. Keep another hard drive in the house but physically disconnected to mitigate against getting hacked, power spikes/ dropouts, etc. and keep a copy of everything important to you off-site to mitigate against fire, floods, theft, etc.

 

[AandPDan]

Originally Posted By: TWG1572
The laptop is on the way out in the next 12 months, and will be replaced by a desktop. The drives on that should solve my primary storage constraints. My plan is to do a homebuild, just because I'd like to learn how to do it. Probably will run some sort of RAID 1 configuration.


Great idea both from the learning experience and RAID.

Originally Posted By: TWG1572
I purchased a Seagate 2TB NAS last week, thinking that was the solution to my space issues and aging HD on my laptop. Plus the cloud features would be nice for the grandparents and pictures. Unfortunately, it has to be wireless access since I don't have ethernet through the house. I put my pictures, etc on there but is is very laggy. So laggy it's annoying. I could still return this drive if I wanted to.


Why does the NAS need to be wireless? Just move it next to your router and hardwire it. It may not help, depending upon the rest of your network configuration but it is worth a try.

Originally Posted By: TWG1572
I can't move the router closer to my main living room to enhance the connection, since only one outlet in my house is wired for DSL and that is in the basement. The service guy said the prior owner did it because the house wiring was such that I need a "home run" to get proper signal strength.


As long as you don't have a DSL modem/router combo you can move the router. Leave the DSL modem where it is and run Cat5 from the modem to the router.

Originally Posted By: TWG1572
I really have more questions than answers at this point. It seems like having two backup drives and Carbonite is overkill.


With data that is priceless (your kids pictures) it's not overkill.

 

[CarbonSteel]

Originally Posted By: TWG1572
It seems like having two backup drives and Carbonite is overkill.

Only until a real disaster occurs. I am not sure how much data that you have on Carbonite, but I had nearly 1TB (uploaded via a DS3 connection--45MBS synchronous) and it took nearly 2 weeks to download it as a test restore.

In this instance, having a local copy of the data is a huge time saver. Conversely, in the event you had a fire that destroyed the backup drives, you would still have your data online for retrieval.

I am in the midst of writing a novel and so to protect it, I have 3 RAID1 backup devices (in different locations) and Mozy Pro (and can still be concerned about data loss).

I think you are well protected and not "overkilled".

 

[tommygunn]

Carbonite is a handy one just to get your backups outside of your house. That way a fire can't destroy your only backups and its a key problem a lot of people don't think about until its too late. For what its worth though if you're keeping an entire backup on an online storage service a single backup in your house is already plenty of extra duty. Get a wired NAS, put it with your modem, it really doesn't matter where it sits anyhow and you'll save yourself plenty of money and heartache. Wireless is good for stuff that is moved around...your backup server, your NAS, is a server...it should never need to be moved or looked at.

As for RAID 1 just a friendly reminder, its not the same as a good backup. In fact in all retrospect RAID 1 is pretty useless on a desktop computer. RAID 1's primary objective is to keep a hard drive failure from causing computer downtime as a virus or software glitch or even an accidental "delete" will still kill all of your data. Regular "offline" backups to other drives or cloud services are what you need to do.

I run RAID 1 on a server I built which is where all my regular backups are made. I don't run cloud backups but I have data I don't much care for if I end up losing it (so you're already one better then me). The server runs RAID 1 mostly because a hard drive failure has killed the server before and it frustrates people who use my server because it often takes days to rebuild the hard drives, versus letting it boot off a single hard drive until I replace the dead one.

Thats about the only realistic purpose for RAID 1; redundant drives for mission-critical computing. Its no safeguard to data. Regular backups are. And since you're using hard drive(s) and a cloud service I think you've got your bases plenty covered.

 

[CarbonSteel]

Originally Posted By: tommygunn
Thats about the only realistic purpose for RAID 1; redundant drives for mission-critical computing. Its no safeguard to data. Regular backups are. And since you're using hard drive(s) and a cloud service I think you've got your bases plenty covered.

Totally agree; RAID is only for hardware failure, not backup protection, but Carbonite has you covered along with your other backups.

 

[Donald]

I do my backups to a RAID 1 drive enclosure. 2x2TB drives. I store some pictures there also. And backups of my old computer before I got rid of it. eSATA connected enclosure with the RAID built into the chipset.

 

[TWG1572]

Thanks for the feedback so far! I feel better knowing I'm not in total overkill mode.

To clarify, my NAS is hard wired to a Westell 7550 wireless router/dsl modem combo. The wireless connection from the laptop to the router is my bottleneck. I'm on Frontier, and am required to pay a $7 month rental fee regardless of if I have my own equipment or use theirs. So, I use their router/modem. But I would buy my own if I could demonstrate a performance difference. My basement is finished, so putting a modem downstairs and running ethernet upstairs to the router is an issue for multiple reasons. My only option might be to try some ethernet over coax technology. I'm open to input here...

I had not understood the "Raid 1 is not backup" concept until about a week ago, when I started poking around the Small Network Builder forum. My only data loss was a hard drive crash 10+ years ago when I was young, ignorant, and not backing up. The thought that there are two up to date copies of my data sitting out there lets me sleep a bit better. I'll have to weigh the cost of the disk vs. that feel good feeling. But I now get the concept that I also need incremental backups to protect against accidential deletion.

So. I think my plan is to continue to run with Carbonite for off-site storage. Then do weekly backups to my external HD, which is stored in a safe. The Seagate NAS comes with Memeo backup software so I set that up to do a backup to the NAS. It says it's instant - I haven't figured out yet if that means its more of a sync/raid1, or if it is incremental.