Multiple back ups.

[Avalon]

I have not changed anything part way through.

Shocking though this is to you (and only you), you have.

I’m after some advice. I’m looking to upgrade my storage and have multiple back ups. I’m in the process of buying a Mac Mini. My process would be:

- Back up Mac Mini daily.
- Have two Hard Drives that would store files that I need but don’t need access to all of the time. Then have another set of hard drives that mirror those hard drives.

- Then have another set of hard drives that back them up. Like a none destructive back up.

Then have a external hard drive that’s not on the network.

Is this possible at all as I’ve some family photos, videos and memories that I would like to keep hold of.

So that's a mac mini, backed up to somewhere? A pair of drives (that clearly aren't going in the mac mini) with 'files' that you don't need access to all the time, that are then mirrored to another pair of drives, which are then 'backed up' to another set of drives (on the same site?), and a external drive that's not on the network (on the same site again?). That's at least 7 drives so far, fault tolerant mirrors, and an offline backup. We haven't discussed data volumes yet, but I hope they are either low, or you have more than a grand set aside in todays storage market.

Right. Sorry for the over complication. I’m just trying to eliminate any possible data corruption or loss of media.

Now this, although you don't seem to understand why, is actually different. It's not a bunch of external drives and a mac mini running on some horrible ASUS router/mesh set-up that they can't be bothered to secure, so good job you asked about Firewalla and were steered to better things. It's also likley not a toy NAS. For this, you need to consider the entire data pathway from creation/acquisition through to storage and auditing against initial hashes to confirm no bit-rot/flip. Ideally you are including both local and off-site backups as well as 'little' things like how caches are powered and flushed on power loss, so it's a good job your UPS thread wasn't a pipe dream because you'll need whatever you purchased for this, but with that 24hr run time, you should be golden, what did you end up with? You may also want to consider how you handle clustering and move the JF server onto that, unfortunately because you didn't tell anyone about this future requirement at the time, I have a feeling that your hardware for that may be unsuitable to run as a node if this is going where I would imagine, but what hardware did you end up buying? Realistically if it's not supporting full fat ECC then it's not going to help with your (new) stated requirment.

If you can confirm what exactly is in play eg UPS type/capacity, existing server spec, data volume/performance requirment(s), anticipated growth, initial and ongoing budget, and that you actually do mean what you said about 'eliminating any possible data corruption or loss of media', it'll make it a lot easier to suggest an appropriate solution.

 

[Snapshot]

No problem. I just thought the SSD would not only be faster but better than hard drives. I’ve had a few HDDs fail. But then there is nVMe. But it could have been the WD Blacks that may have been my HDD issue.

Whether NVMe is 'better' than HDD is still undecided. HDDs are certainly better for long-term data retention. Speed isn't really an issue as you're only writing backups. My main NAS has four WD Red Pros in RAID 10 that can sustain 4Gbps so the source has to be able to do at least that. What's the network port speed on your Mac Mini?