External HD, desktop HD or NAS HD in a NAS for media cold backup?

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djtron
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Joined: Sun Aug 08, 2021 10:15 pm

External HD, desktop HD or NAS HD in a NAS for media cold backup?

Post by djtron »

Hi, my current setup is:

1. 2 bay NAS with 2x8tb ironwolf drives - main media storage (opened 4 to 8hr/day)
2. 4 bay NAS with 1x8tb enterprise noisy drive - cold backup (open as needed) for media and docs (main docs at pc).
3. 4tb portable hard drive - cold (plugged as needed) backup for media

Now, I'm looking for more cold backup for my growing media files. I have questions:
1. Is it better to buy a Seagate Hub Plus? If yes, is $130 for an 8tb or a 10tb for $160 a good buy? Around $80 discount from a private seller vs. Amazon (see below link).
2. Is that Seagate hub plus a SMR? If yes, still a good buy? Can I schuck this?
3. Or a regular 8tb desktop hard drive (barracuda) which I will put in my 4 bay NAS for $155.
4. Or an 8tb ironwolf drive which I will put in my 4 bay NAS for $180.

THANKS!

https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-External ... 747&sr=8-2
Thisisnotmyname
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Posts: 447
Joined: Mon Nov 19, 2018 1:21 am

Re: External HD, desktop HD or NAS HD in a NAS for media cold backup?

Post by Thisisnotmyname »

Everyone's needs and risk level vary but my advice would be to get your backups into a different geographic location (e.g. the cloud or a tape service). In any of the approaches you've laid out if your house burns down you've lost everything. You've framed this as "media" so maybe that's just backups of your CD and Bluray collections in which case who cares, insurance will cover them, you'll just be out the time to order them and back it up again, but if that's photos and videos of your family or media you have created with significant time investment then I'd be looking into offsite (Amazon's various cloud storage services, Backblaze, etc...).

If 8TB of cloud storage is outside your budget (it's not a big amount on something like S3 or BB but it's a recurring cost) then I'd try to work out a deal with a friend or family member to put the second NAS at their home, VPN (not exposing either NAS to the internet, use your routers) together, and backup from one NAS to the other. In that case, put a second 8TB drive in the other NAS and use the same RAID level (I'm assuming 1) as your primary. Ideally all the drives would be NAS rated drives (e.g. the Ironwolf drives you have in your primary) but if the primary is already a backup of data on your internal drives in various systems and this second NAS is a backup of a backup... again you can decide your own risk level.

edit to add: personally I incorporate all of the above into my overall backup strategy but I really dislike slow speeds so I would not use a "typical" external drive. I do have external drives but they are in single or dual NVMe drive enclosures with TB3 or USB 3.2 connectivity so transfer speeds are close to internal NVMe SSDs. I also use NAS to NAS across fat pipes and I have everything up in the cloud for disaster recovery. All are valid approaches, you just have to balance your own tolerance for cost/risk/performance. A typical USB enclosure (make sure it's at least USB3 and your NAS isn't limited to USB2) with a 5400 RPM drive in it will be crazy slow, risky because that single drive fails and you're out of luck, but very cost effective. NAS to NAS on typical home 1GbE hardware with good drives in RAID1 won't win any races (as long as you didn't get a USB2 enclosure or your NAS only supports USB2 the actual transport will likely be slower than USB) but you'd at least have the robustness of RAID1 but with a higher price point. If your units support 10GbE or TB then you can take advantage of the disk speed itself (1GbE tops out at 125MB/s minus networking overhead, you'll probably average around the 100MB/s mark versus good drive sustained sequential write speeds being ~220MB/s). NAS to NAS with RAID0 (provided you're on something faster than 1GbE) will get you higher write speed (and double the effective storage) but you run the risk that if either drive fails you lose the whole array. It's the typical "you can have any two of robust, performant, cheap; pick your poison." To me both the robustness (I don't want to have a catastrophic hardware failure without redundancy, sure everything is up in the cloud but pulling back down from the cloud is unbelievably slow) and performance (moving your 8TB of data at 100MB/s will take roughly 24 hours of continuous writing) are important which is why I spend more and buy good gear.
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dolbyman
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Re: External HD, desktop HD or NAS HD in a NAS for media cold backup?

Post by dolbyman »

never do backups to internal drives ..so backing up to these disks without shucking them, is the way to go
djtron
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Joined: Sun Aug 08, 2021 10:15 pm

Re: External HD, desktop HD or NAS HD in a NAS for media cold backup?

Post by djtron »

Thisisnotmyname wrote: Sat Sep 18, 2021 5:32 pm Everyone's needs and risk level vary but my advice would be to get your backups into a different geographic location (e.g. the cloud or a tape service). In any of the approaches you've laid out if your house burns down you've lost everything. You've framed this as "media" so maybe that's just backups of your CD and Bluray collections in which case who cares, insurance will cover them, you'll just be out the time to order them and back it up again, but if that's photos and videos of your family or media you have created with significant time investment then I'd be looking into offsite (Amazon's various cloud storage services, Backblaze, etc...).

If 8TB of cloud storage is outside your budget (it's not a big amount on something like S3 or BB but it's a recurring cost) then I'd try to work out a deal with a friend or family member to put the second NAS at their home, VPN (not exposing either NAS to the internet, use your routers) together, and backup from one NAS to the other. In that case, put a second 8TB drive in the other NAS and use the same RAID level (I'm assuming 1) as your primary. Ideally all the drives would be NAS rated drives (e.g. the Ironwolf drives you have in your primary) but if the primary is already a backup of data on your internal drives in various systems and this second NAS is a backup of a backup... again you can decide your own risk level.

edit to add: personally I incorporate all of the above into my overall backup strategy but I really dislike slow speeds so I would not use a "typical" external drive. I do have external drives but they are in single or dual NVMe drive enclosures with TB3 or USB 3.2 connectivity so transfer speeds are close to internal NVMe SSDs. I also use NAS to NAS across fat pipes and I have everything up in the cloud for disaster recovery. All are valid approaches, you just have to balance your own tolerance for cost/risk/performance. A typical USB enclosure (make sure it's at least USB3 and your NAS isn't limited to USB2) with a 5400 RPM drive in it will be crazy slow, risky because that single drive fails and you're out of luck, but very cost effective. NAS to NAS on typical home 1GbE hardware with good drives in RAID1 won't win any races (as long as you didn't get a USB2 enclosure or your NAS only supports USB2 the actual transport will likely be slower than USB) but you'd at least have the robustness of RAID1 but with a higher price point. If your units support 10GbE or TB then you can take advantage of the disk speed itself (1GbE tops out at 125MB/s minus networking overhead, you'll probably average around the 100MB/s mark versus good drive sustained sequential write speeds being ~220MB/s). NAS to NAS with RAID0 (provided you're on something faster than 1GbE) will get you higher write speed (and double the effective storage) but you run the risk that if either drive fails you lose the whole array. It's the typical "you can have any two of robust, performant, cheap; pick your poison." To me both the robustness (I don't want to have a catastrophic hardware failure without redundancy, sure everything is up in the cloud but pulling back down from the cloud is unbelievably slow) and performance (moving your 8TB of data at 100MB/s will take roughly 24 hours of continuous writing) are important which is why I spend more and buy good gear.
Thank you very much for such a very detailed suggestions!
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