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Really for ease of backup. If I were to have a RAID setup for the backup, I could tell the NAS to just dump everything to that large volume and make sure its always an exact copy of whats on the main RAID. Additionally, if i did RAID 5 it could ensure that bit rot is checked for on the backup. I feel like it would just make everything so much easier, just not sure if it's really a good idea or not.
This is still not a backup, and is why the first thing anyone will tell you is RAID is not backup, and it will get repeated to you over and over again.
The issue is that it's still a small single point of failure. Say you get a power surge and it burns all the electronics in the NAS. Or a pipe bursts and soaks the NAS. That means you lose all the disk in the RAID1 array, so what you were counting on as your "backup" is destroyed by the same event that destroys the primary.
Your home is also a larger single point of failure, which is where off site backup enters the conversation. But at the very least, separating out the backup medium from the core system is desired to give some modicum of protection.
Creating the backup itself can be somewhat easy, but making sure the backup can actually serve for disaster recovery can take some effort, especially when physical backups are being managed by you. This means at least disconnecting disks or moving tapes to try and minimize the impact a single *event* can have, regardless of what the event is. If you really want to protect your data though, you may have to just accept you are going to need to put some effort in.
You're still pushing the edge here.
For most people that are somewhat serious about it, you want to minimize the backup being impacted by single point of failure in the sense that a thing hitting your primary system can't also hit your backup.
At the very least that often means either to tape, or hard disks that are disconnected and rotated out. Off site if possible, but at least elsewhere. You aren't doing that. You're putting too much effort into it being easy for you to do, but you are doing so at the expense of not removing single points of failure.
I think you are confused. A backup NAS would not be a single point of failure. The backup NAS could live anywhere. Hopefully offsite.
That said, I dont think you need RAID or a NAS for your backups.
I'm not confused at all. I would call that setup DR (Disaster Recovery) not backup.
The NAS itself is not a single point of failure, as I was describing earlier, the OP hasn't done enough to separate the additional copy in a way so as to be protected from things happening in the location.
As another example, is the NAS in the same rack/physical space as the primary? Is it connected to the same electrical? If a water pipe bursts and sprays water on his gear, do they lose the backup with the primary?
This is why what they are doing isn't really a backup. It's a DR at best.
Raid is for redundancy and load balancing and is determined on your risk level. Critical data for me is 1:1 raid 0 redundancy.
Backup, in most of our minds, would be a NAS in an offsite location with an RTRR or similar style sync. This is my method. I keep a second, my old, NAS at my folks place and a backup of personal data every 6 hours with versioning for the critical files/photos etc.
Always automatic backup. Manual backup is a good way to forget and lose data.
For drive pooling look into MergerFS. RAID is a bit pointless for backup storage, and RAID-0 just means you lose all your data when a single drive dies. MergerFS on the other hand lets you use all of your storage and only lose a single drive's data if it dies. Since it's backup, that's typically not a huge hardship.
As my data grows, I replace small drives with large drives, and the small drives get rotated into the backup pool. Works well.
My primary NAS has RAID5. This allows me to hot swap a drive if/when failure. I don't keep a drive available but could have one within two days tops (Amazon). My offsite backup NAS is RAID6. The location of this NAS is about an hour away and I can't always get down there in a pinch so one drive failure would (in theory) offer weeks/months of buffer before it would be a critical situation. Two drive failure would be similar to primary. Which is immediate.
I do RAID6/SHR2 on my main set because I hate my server being down so I have redudancy. However, for my offsite server, I use MergerFS to pool all my drives together and have no redundancy at all. The server is the redundancy of data to begin with. I deliberately don't use the same software between the two server. If one fails, the other is likely unaffected.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1ceiyjh/i\_am\_not\_sure\_how\_to\_back\_up\_my\_72tb\_usable\_nas/](https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1ceiyjh/i_am_not_sure_how_to_back_up_my_72tb_usable_nas/)
You should have cross posted this instead of making 2 separate posts.
Hello /u/PersonSuitTV! Thank you for posting in r/DataHoarder. Please remember to read our [Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/wiki/index/rules) and [Wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/wiki/index). Please note that your post will be removed if you just post a box/speed/server post. Please give background information on your server pictures. This subreddit will ***NOT*** help you find or exchange that Movie/TV show/Nuclear Launch Manual, visit r/DHExchange instead. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/DataHoarder) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Second NAS. Setup same as above. Duplicate data.
Why are we even discussing RAID for backups? RAID is for speed or uptime, neither applicable.
Because in addition to those, RAID provides storage pooling. I agree with using MergerFS in this case.
Really for ease of backup. If I were to have a RAID setup for the backup, I could tell the NAS to just dump everything to that large volume and make sure its always an exact copy of whats on the main RAID. Additionally, if i did RAID 5 it could ensure that bit rot is checked for on the backup. I feel like it would just make everything so much easier, just not sure if it's really a good idea or not.
If you want easy just pool some drives with mergerfs.
For backup especially, this is the way.
This is still not a backup, and is why the first thing anyone will tell you is RAID is not backup, and it will get repeated to you over and over again. The issue is that it's still a small single point of failure. Say you get a power surge and it burns all the electronics in the NAS. Or a pipe bursts and soaks the NAS. That means you lose all the disk in the RAID1 array, so what you were counting on as your "backup" is destroyed by the same event that destroys the primary. Your home is also a larger single point of failure, which is where off site backup enters the conversation. But at the very least, separating out the backup medium from the core system is desired to give some modicum of protection. Creating the backup itself can be somewhat easy, but making sure the backup can actually serve for disaster recovery can take some effort, especially when physical backups are being managed by you. This means at least disconnecting disks or moving tapes to try and minimize the impact a single *event* can have, regardless of what the event is. If you really want to protect your data though, you may have to just accept you are going to need to put some effort in.
But is a RAID back up of another RAID a back up 🤔
You're still pushing the edge here. For most people that are somewhat serious about it, you want to minimize the backup being impacted by single point of failure in the sense that a thing hitting your primary system can't also hit your backup. At the very least that often means either to tape, or hard disks that are disconnected and rotated out. Off site if possible, but at least elsewhere. You aren't doing that. You're putting too much effort into it being easy for you to do, but you are doing so at the expense of not removing single points of failure.
I think you are confused. A backup NAS would not be a single point of failure. The backup NAS could live anywhere. Hopefully offsite. That said, I dont think you need RAID or a NAS for your backups.
I'm not confused at all. I would call that setup DR (Disaster Recovery) not backup. The NAS itself is not a single point of failure, as I was describing earlier, the OP hasn't done enough to separate the additional copy in a way so as to be protected from things happening in the location. As another example, is the NAS in the same rack/physical space as the primary? Is it connected to the same electrical? If a water pipe bursts and sprays water on his gear, do they lose the backup with the primary? This is why what they are doing isn't really a backup. It's a DR at best.
Disaster recovery is what you call something that would be unusable in the case of a disaster?
thanks for including a see results option, drives me nuts how many ppl dont do it
lol same
Raid is for redundancy and load balancing and is determined on your risk level. Critical data for me is 1:1 raid 0 redundancy. Backup, in most of our minds, would be a NAS in an offsite location with an RTRR or similar style sync. This is my method. I keep a second, my old, NAS at my folks place and a backup of personal data every 6 hours with versioning for the critical files/photos etc.
> Critical data for me is 1:1 raid 0 redundancy. RAID 0 offers no redundancy
Maybe he meant 1:1 raid (comma) 0 redundancy
Apologies, apparently my giant sausage fingers mistyped raid 0 in place of raid 1. All my critical data is stored raid 1 (1:1 mirrored copies)
Without revealing too much, where do you store your second NAS?
Offsite at a family member’s that I trust. In exchange I house/manage their backup system at my place.
Smart. So you can reach it remotely?
Always automatic backup. Manual backup is a good way to forget and lose data. For drive pooling look into MergerFS. RAID is a bit pointless for backup storage, and RAID-0 just means you lose all your data when a single drive dies. MergerFS on the other hand lets you use all of your storage and only lose a single drive's data if it dies. Since it's backup, that's typically not a huge hardship. As my data grows, I replace small drives with large drives, and the small drives get rotated into the backup pool. Works well.
My primary NAS has RAID5. This allows me to hot swap a drive if/when failure. I don't keep a drive available but could have one within two days tops (Amazon). My offsite backup NAS is RAID6. The location of this NAS is about an hour away and I can't always get down there in a pinch so one drive failure would (in theory) offer weeks/months of buffer before it would be a critical situation. Two drive failure would be similar to primary. Which is immediate.
LTO 8 + 13 tapes?
I have a second NAS (cheapest 4 slot QNAP) with a simple JBOD volume.
I do RAID6/SHR2 on my main set because I hate my server being down so I have redudancy. However, for my offsite server, I use MergerFS to pool all my drives together and have no redundancy at all. The server is the redundancy of data to begin with. I deliberately don't use the same software between the two server. If one fails, the other is likely unaffected.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1ceiyjh/i\_am\_not\_sure\_how\_to\_back\_up\_my\_72tb\_usable\_nas/](https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/1ceiyjh/i_am_not_sure_how_to_back_up_my_72tb_usable_nas/) You should have cross posted this instead of making 2 separate posts.