Describe your storage setup

Nash

Nash

Nash

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Bristol
I am interested in expanding my storage setup. Currently I have a 500GB internal hard drive on my computer and an external 500GB Western Digital 500GB My Book.

I want to have some kind of redundancy in my backup in case of a hard drive failure so I am tempted by RAID mirroring and/or a Drobo or something similar. What setup do you prefer? Do you run it through ethernet or USB 2.0? Anyone use Firewire 800?

How safe is safe when backing up? Do you clone the hard drive using RAID? Do you have another hard drive in a different location in case of fire/burglary?

Thanks for your input.

p.s. am I the only one who has master plans of creating terabytes and terabytes of storage space? If I had my way I'd make a cluster of servers in our (non-existent) basement that was networked through the whole house. Alas, the inner geek in me wants it but it's unrealistic!
 
My backup system is based around an Atom system in an inwin BP655 case with the OS on an SSD and a single large storage disc in there. For critical backups I have 2x external USB2.0 500gig Seagate Free Agent drives using software mirroring (so I can recover files from either disc by just plugging it into another machine). For all non critical files I have a couple of larger external HDDs that they get thrown on.

I have a few gig of storage on my phone which has some critical files on incase of fire/burglary and also some stuff backed up offsite on a VPS.
 
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You Can Never have enough space.
Ive currently got a WD 640GB and a Maxtor 250GB in pc, I have a 1TB external with all my films and tv shows on plus another 1TB external with all my apps and stuff on plus a backup of all documents.

Also got my old pc with a 250GB HDD in and a pc under desk with 160GB in mainly for backup incase of pc crash for fault finding. Will be getting a nice SSD next so i can use that for Win 7.

It is inevitable though that you cannot buy enough Drives or backup your data enough 1 day it will all be gone.
 
5 internal disks.

1x150gb raptor for OS
1x1tb for music, games (installers) and photos etc
1x1.5tb for hd movies (full)
1x1tb for tv shows (contains overflow from movies)
1x500gb used as temporary folder, downloads etc.

planning on having 2x2tb disks in there in thr so and removing the 500gb and the 1tb.

also planning on swapping the raptor with a vertex bigfoot.
 
Internally in the main rig I have 2x 73GB SCSI U320 10K RPM drives, 1x 146GB SCS U320 10K RPM drive and a 160GB SATAII drive

In the laptop I have a pair of Hitachi 7K500 drives in RAID0

In my HP Mediasmart Windows Home Server I have a 1tb drive and a 1.5tb drive making up the pool
 
Internal:
1TB WD Primary for OS/applications and so on
1TB WD Data
750GB Samsung Data
500GB Samsung Data
500GB WD Data

External:
1TB WD Backup of important data only
1TB WD Data

I'm actually still looking for a good program which will backup only selected files/folders and then keep the backup up to date when I next plug in my external drive. If anyone has any backup software recommendations please let me know, It doesn't need to be free either.
 
- Missus has a simple system, just dual 80GB HDDs in RAID0
- My PC did have a Perc5 card & 4x 500GB Samsung F3s running in RAID10.
- Media (Videos/Music/Downloads) is all stored on an external 750GB RAID1 Buffalo NAS box.

The only back up I do is a image of missus' PC to the NAS every now and again as she has a disturbing habit of saving important documents to her local disks instead of the NAs, despite my insistent training to use the NAS.

My own PCs 1TB RAID10 array is good enough - the disk space serves as a scratch pad for my 3D Rendering stuff, anything I want to actually keep goes to the NAS for long term storage. Its more critical to me to keep the PC working rather than actual Data loss, so RAID10 suits this just fine and gives vastly improved disk performance as well.

Saying all that, my PC is in bits now and has been mostly sold off. I'm looking at going the dual SSD route (Windows & Apps on one, Games on the other), so I might image an initial windows install and thats about it. Might keep the 500GB Sammys as a 'working' storage space for my 3D work.

For future backups/expansion, I may look at replacing the NAS with a Gigabit NAS or small (tiny) file server. The NAS is nice and small and fits on a shelf, but the fan is really whiny and the 750GB space is slowly running out...
 
RAID is a redundancy method and not a backup function, it doesnt protect against fire, theft, deletion, corruption and some types of hardware failure (controller fail for example corrupting all attached drives).

always have your data on two (or more devices) with one of those copies off site.
 
1 x 120GB Revodrive - system disk for Win 7
4 x 1.5TB Samdungs in RAID5 array controlled on Megaraid 4i - Bluray films for projector
2 x 1.5TB Samdungs in RAID 1 Stripe - fast disk evaluation
2 x 1TB Western Digi'd in RAID 1 Stripe

Various images swapped on the smaller disks above and kept on the RAID5 array. Striping to improve performance on disks used for ripping etc. Everything backed up to LTO-4 as I have previously lost everything!
40bay SATA Chenbro monster on back order for my new media server which will be running Vail.. as long as they sort out the Connector software issues.
 
Drive C - 500gb F3 - OS & Software
Drive D - 2x 1tb F3 Raid1 - Data (Work, Photographs etc)
Drive E - 1x 1.5tb F2 - Media (Music Collection, DVD Collection)

External Drive 1 - D Drive Backup
External Drive 2 - "Vault" for RAW files (immediate 2nd backup after a photo job), important files.

Portable Drive - Important file backups - kept off site.

Online Backup - In Process of organising, will be mirror of D.
 
forgot to add my setup..

System Drive (Windows, Lightroom Cat) - 60Gb OCZ Vertex
Storage Drive (Photos, Movies, Music, Docs) - 4tb (RAID5) Synology DS1010+
Off site Drive Backup (Photos and Movies) - Selection of Seagate 750Gb/500Gb
Off site Media Backup (Photos only) - Blu-Ray
 
as of next week a AMD based server running unRAID with 14TB in there, my audio machine has OS drive plus 2X 1TB, my gaming machine the same - everything else ion boxes (for movies) and macbook are all default. And a couple of 1TB USB drives for spare backups etc.
 
Desktop: 320gb SATA for windows and whatever's installed

Server: Pentium 2, Debian. 3x750GB SATA in software RAID-5 for a 1.5tb effective store, 300gb system drive.

...three externals for backing up the things I would actually miss if it went up in smoke.
 
mupet0000 said:
............I'm actually still looking for a good program which will backup only selected files/folders and then keep the backup up to date when I next plug in my external drive. If anyone has any backup software recommendations please let me know, It doesn't need to be free either.
Click to expand...

I would have thought there are a number of free apps which would do what you want although I've never tried them. Google should find them.
I've used SecondCopy for a number of years. It's not free but I suspect not expensive.

You can backup selected folders and/or partitions by creating profiles to operate on any combination of startup, shutdown or schedule.
There are quite a few options available. The interface is a bit old fashioned.
If you need to retain earlier copies of some files it will retain up to 25 archived backups.

If you plug in an external drive and there is a profile relating to that drive letter you will be prompted to run it.
You can specify in the profile that it only applies to a particular named drive.
 
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