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Hello,

I’m trying to recommend a backup strategy as I do not like the one that we have in place (backup to onsite NAS, one copy, goes back to whenever we decide to do backups). My recommendation is to purchase 6 hard drives, 4 that are 2 TB and 2 that are 1 TB but I’m unsure about what brands are best in the industry.

Plan:
(4) 2 TB drives to back up certain server data once a month, kept offsite and will span 3 months.
(2) 1 TB drives to archive and take files off the server, one stored on site and one stored offsite, tested and server cleaned every 3 months.
(2) NAS devices with various server back ups throughout the month (one full for each week and daily differential for past week)

Note: This is looking for external hard drives that are to be taken off site, not for the NAS drives themselves.

4 Spice ups
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So the drive choices aren’t really a big deal here, you’re talking about very little storage over all.

What I would recommend would be the Western Digital NAS line, and create an OBR6 or OBR10 (if you go really high capacity array).

Creating separate arrays is never a good idea.

1 Spice up
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I would say that if you have the NAS devices, and couple them with a cloud backup solution, that would be a better primary backup plan. I would still use the offsite drives but make that plan C. As for the brand of hard drives, I personally like WD but I have also heard good things about Seagate.

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For the choice of the NAS device, what have you considered, and how much storage space do you need?

You want to keep 3 months worth of backups, so how much storage do you have consumed today, and how much does your data change in a week?

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Joshua,

What backup software you plan to use ?

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To be clear: We have about 1 TB of data at the moment and we’re not expecting that to increase dramatically. Based on current estimates (and tracking growth) we’ll be good at this current rate for 4 years.

We have two NAS devices, one which is 5 TB while the other is 10 TB, more than enough for the purposes.

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Tape is much more rugged for offsite duties than banging hd around in the back of a car/van etc

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So if you have 5TB and 10TB of currently available space, what is the question regarding which drives are better for use in a backup target?

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One full backup each month, on one of the (4) 2 TB drives. We had roughly 2 TB of data until I went through and archived files that were between 2 to 8 years old, deleting duplicates of things saved 600 GB while moving older files to an archiving drive cleared 380 GB more. We’re at roughly 1 TB of data with an increase of 80 GB since I started tracking 3 months ago.

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Not to sound rude, but even the most expensive drive in the world that offers the “best statistics” will fail eventually. The concern here is completely missing things like spindle speed (if using winchester drives), which effects write and recovery time.

So in any configuration you have to do the math and figure out how long the array will take to repair when a drive dies, and what the likely-hood is of another drive failing during that recovery window.

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External drives, I want to leave the NAS as is but back up from the NAS to an external drive that can be stored off site. Write speed is always a pain in the butt and I’m not very knowledgeable about which externals would be best for a server backup and to ensure that there’s no failure.

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So rather than using another disk array for this that is offsite, use a data service provider like Backblaze, the price for a meager 10TB might be $5/month.

All you need to do is have your NAS’s push to your B2 account, and you’d have offsite replicated backups without needing to worry about more drives.

1 Spice up
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Another factor to consider is how much storage capacity you need. The simplest NAS device has space for one internal hard drive, but more complex units can have two to eight or even more drives. For backing up a couple of PCs or your family’s phones, 1TB to 2TB should be sufficient.

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Joshua - are you open to using a cloud backup solution to automate the offsite backups?

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External drives, I want to leave the NAS as is but back up from the NAS to an external drive that can be stored off site. Write speed is always a pain in the butt and I’m not very knowledgeable about which externals would be best for a server backup and to ensure that there’s no failure.

I’d say look at high-rely.com for a NAS with integrated removable drives if this is what you’re looking to do.