Small server with a good redundant RAID array is a must. Grab all your spare drives, grab a scrap system and a RAID card and toss em in!

11 6tb drives in a Supermicro case running FreeNas using ZFS RAIDZ3.
Built back in 2007 but hasn't changed much. Added low end video card. Replaced fans with quiet fans. Filled all drive bays. Upgraded memory to 16gb.
Currently ver of FreeNAS is incompatible with my motherboard 🙁 so will likely look into upgrading next year.

Offsites:
1 Synology 5 bay with 6TB drives RAID5
1 QNAP 6 bay with 6TB drives RAID 5
1 QNAP 6 bay with 6TB drives RAID 5

Over the years I went from:
Floppies->CDs->USB enclosures->Multiple 2 Bay NAS->5 & 6 Bay NAS

I backup ALL of my data so the best advice I can offer is to:
Identify what you actually need to keep for backups. If you have a super fast internet connection then mabye you can just put the files you don't need on archive.org, etc.
Keep an offsite backup
Verify you can restore and that your data is intact.
Currently I do not use encryption due to overhead but that's on my todo probably when Qnap\Synology NAS support ZFS and I rebuild my home server.
Don't use unreliable backup media. USB enclosures were always flaky for me (but I have a ton of data)

I do keep a 2GB truecrypt (veracrypt ftw!) container synced via dropbox online that stores important personal items but I definetly need to organize it and delete some crap.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth- … -data-retention
Don't use SSD for backup unless you're just talking about 1 external HD to backup a couple of files and you're transporting it all over the place. They are still too expensive unless you don't have much data to back up....

A regular HD is just fine for backups but I'd recommend having at least 2 more HD's for copies. (Obviously around the 5 year mark replace with a new HD)

There are M-DISC DVD and BD-R's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

I've been trialing Microsoft OneDrive for my backups and at this stage it's too slow to be viable. I trust MS to sort that out eventually so in the mean time I'm using 2 external USB HDD's and storing them in different locations.

DosFreak wrote:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth- … -data-retention
Don't use SSD for backup ...

In particular I wouldn't use any SSD with TLC NAND for cold unpowered storage. Even less so if it's planar TLC ...

I use external HDDs as back up, or I should say I always plan to use external HDD as backup. I have only experienced one HDD failure that led to serious dataloss on my main system during the 25 years I have been using compuers and that was about two years ago. When that happend I realized that my latest backup was OLD.

I did not learn much though! I now have 13TB (5+5+3) of external HDD storage bought for making backups but my latest backup is at least 6 months old by now, the two 5TB drives I bought on black friday are still in their boxes.

The answer is simple. Just backup everything you want backed up multiple times, on multiples types of media, preferably in multiple physical locations. Refresh backups once in a while.

They will all eventually fail, but the chance they will all fail at the same time will be negligible.

dr_st wrote:

The answer is simple. Just backup everything you want backed up multiple times.

+1
I have 3 backups
- An old server I fire up from time to time when I think enough has changed
- An external HDD attached to my media PC, its left alone most of the time so realitivly safe from acadental deletes but easier to access then the server
- A recovery partiton on each of my PC's, so my Dos PC has a partiton of Dos, Windows, game instal files, My 9x Pc has a partion with windows, office games install files, etc, etc

All 3 will die sooner or later but not at the same time unless the house burns down in which case I'll be more upset about the hardware, oh and loosing everything else of course!

Photos I try to upload to online albams, but thats more to share with family back in Oz, but has saved me once.

Also refreshing old data from time to time with something like Diskfresh ain't a bad idea.

When the 840 EVO debacle came to light here your servant and other users succesfully used Diskfresh to restore old file read speeds back to spec (though this procedure eats away from the SSD's TBW).

TELVM wrote:

Also refreshing old data from time to time with something like Diskfresh ain't a bad idea.

When the 840 EVO debacle came to light here your servant and other users succesfully used Diskfresh to restore old file read speeds back to spec (though this procedure eats away from the SSD's TBW).

It sounds like a "lite" version of SpinRite, which is another good tool for keeping HDDs healthy. It also can recover data from bad sectors. I've owned a copy for years and run it 1-2x a year on every hard drive I care about. Never had a drive go bad that I run SR on, and I've actually saved a few drives that were failing with it. It's current iteration is pretty long in the tooth, but it's actually perfect for old hard drives. It doesn't do so well with modern HDDs.

Since we have a lot of photo's we don't want to loose, i use a few storage options. First when we import photo's, we import them to both the harddisk inside the pc and to a external harddisk. Then when the photo's are on the computer, we disconect the usb drive, attach a second external harddisk and copy the files from pc to the second drive.
Photo's that are importent are then backuped to special photo cd's.
Cannot make it any safer.
Used to have a network attached drive, but that one crashed. Every since i use external usbdrives, since they don't use linux partitions. The pcb inside the network attached drive broke down, not the drive. But i had to use a linux boot disk to be able to access the ext4 partition.

RAID 1 arrays in main PC, 2 x external HDDs for backup (theoretically four copies, three independent). And I use the externals (USB / firewire) strictly for backup, not using anything from them daily. And I replace my main PC HDDs every two years.

Google Drive.

For archives I use LTO tape drives, the older models are cheap enough.

TELVM wrote:

Also refreshing old data from time to time with something like Diskfresh ain't a bad idea.

Thank you for mentioning this. I've been aware of bit-rot for a long time, but never bothered to investigate a good way to prevent it. This is just what I needed! Thanks! 😀

TELVM, clueless1:

I've read the documentation that came with DiskFresh. It recommends doing the read/write refresh 3 or 4 times per year. This seems excessive to me. clueless1 says that he does the refresh once or twice per year which seems like a much better plan to me. Refreshing a slow USB 2.0 500gb hard drive took almost 16 hours, so this is a very lengthy process to be running quarterly.

Personally, I've never actually lost hard drive data due to bit rot, although I know that it is a very real concern. Even my really old hard drives are still working and perfectly readable. Doing a refresh every 6 months may still be more frequent that really necessary. What is the collective wisdom of VOGONS on this?

KT7AGuy wrote:

TELVM, clueless1:

I've read the documentation that came with DiskFresh. It recommends doing the read/write refresh 3 or 4 times per year. This seems excessive to me. clueless1 says that he does the refresh once or twice per year which seems like a much better plan to me. Refreshing a slow USB 2.0 500gb hard drive took almost 16 hours, so this is a very lengthy process to be running quarterly.

Personally, I've never actually lost hard drive data due to bit rot, although I know that it is a very real concern. Even my really old hard drives are still working and perfectly readable. Doing a refresh every 6 months may still be more frequent that really necessary. What is the collective wisdom of VOGONS on this?

I haven't used DiskFresh, but it looks like the "refresh" part is very similar to SpinRite's. SpinRite has the added ability to recover/relocate data from bad sectors to spare sectors. I know with SpinRite, scans of USB-connected drives is very slow. It is recommended if you can safely remove the drive from the enclosure to run it on its native interface. That should speed things up quite a bit.

I use SnapRAID. It's great for large media files, but I really need an alternate automated backup solution for small data files. I used to back those up on a schedule using NTBackup, but then I started migrating my data to a linux server. I've been dragging my feet on getting it all completely implemented properly.

My email provider has a file storage area that I can use for remote backup. I uploaded an encrypted backup of my data files but that was like 3 or 4 years ago. Uploading a file that large without the transfer getting dropped was too painful to want to go through it again.

Another option that I don't think has been mentioned yet is Macrium Reflect. Personal version is free. On my XP time machine I have a 2nd drive that is larger than the 1st and just create images of C: to D: so the backup images are stored on a different physical disk. It's very similar in function to old programs like Norton Ghost or Drive Image. Can be run from and recovered from within the OS or with a Macrium Reflect boot CD (in the event you can't boot into OS).