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Re: How much Redundancy for safety?

vfpeter
Tutor

How much Redundancy for safety?

My ran into "Corrupt root" issue with my ReadyNAS. I have 2 x 2TB disk in X-RAID2. I am praying that I do not lose any data due to this. 

 

Does it make sense to also have a online cloud backup? If so than what's the purpose of RAID? Isn't RAID configuration for scenarios like this?

 

Any insight from the comunity is appreciated. 

 

Thanks,

Pete.

Model: ReadyNAS RNDP200U|ReadyNAS Ultra 2 Plus Chassis only
Message 1 of 16
Hopchen
Prodigy

Re: How much Redundancy for safety?

Hi Pete,

 

"Corrupt root" is usually a minor issue with the OS and the not data. So, you are probably fine here.

 

What is RAID for? Redundancy. If a disk fails, you can survive without data-loss. Remember that this is not the same a backup!! 🙂

 

You should ALWAYS have backups as well. In the cloud, on USB disks, whatever. Just make sure you have up-to-date backups. Your data should always exist on multiple devices - preferably in multiple locations.

Many people mistake RAIDs for backups, but a RAID won't cover you in these scenarios (amoung many):

- Housefire

- Flooding

- Thief steals the NAS

- Corruption of the file system on the NAS

- Accidental deletion of files

- Power surge after a thunderstorm, that then kills your disks

- etc, etc, etc.

 

A RAID is only for redundancy (and performance when talking higher level storage solutions). That is it.

 

Contact support. They should be able to sort that "Corrupt root" for you. And please do backups 🙂

 

 

Cheers

Message 2 of 16
StephenB
Guru

Re: How much Redundancy for safety?


@Hopchen wrote:

 

What is RAID for? Redundancy.


I suspect we are on the same page, but I do want to comment.

 

From my perspective it's better to view RAID as providing more availability.  That is, your data remains accessible to you while you are dealing a single disk failure.

 

 

 

Message 3 of 16
Hopchen
Prodigy

Re: How much Redundancy for safety?

We are indeed on the same page @StephenB 🙂

 

Yeah, it is a good way of putting it.

Message 4 of 16
StephenB
Guru

Re: How much Redundancy for safety?


@vfpeter wrote:

 

If so than what's the purpose of RAID? Isn't RAID configuration for scenarios like this?

 

 


As I mentioned above, the main primary is availability.   Secondary purpose:  expandability.  

 

RAID alone is not enough to keep your data safe.

 


@vfpeter wrote:

 

Does it make sense to also have a online cloud backup?

For a long time I've used a three-copy rule - keeping 3 copies of all my digital data on three different devices (including the original).  The reason for three copies is that I've sometimes found the backup to be unreadable when I needed it.  

 

That "three-copy" guideline predates my ReadyNAS and any use of RAID.  But I've chosen to keep it in place.  Over the years I've used this rule I've never lost data to disk failure or device failures.  Today I implement the three-copy guideline using 3 ReadyNAS.  That's not the cheapest solution, but I find it convenient and reliable.

 

Since I was keeping these copies in one place (my home) I decided to add Crashplan cloud backup for disaster protection a few years back.  Cloud backup does require good internet access, and you do need to review the security/privacy information from the provider.  So far I'm not counting the cloud backup as one of the copies, but that could change in the future.

 

Another approach is to use USB drives for backup, and rotate one off site (perhaps to a safety deposit box).  That can be cheaper, but you do need the discipline to refresh the off-site copy regularly.  A hybrid approach would be to use one USB drive with cloud backup for disaster recovery.

 

One thing to keep in mind - 2-way sync is popular, and some people try to use it for backup.  That's risky, because file deletions and corruption propagates to the other devices.  One-way sync is a better backup approach (and is basically what Crashplan is doing for me).

 

 

Message 5 of 16
vfpeter
Tutor

Re: How much Redundancy for safety?

Thanks @StephenB and @Hochen.

 

@StephenB, Is Crashplan better than dropbox or google drive. I see that cost wise it beats both the other cloud services. 

 

Also, the reason I am using ReadyNAS is so that I have a centralized store for my images and other data fiels at home. I do not want to again have it on all the computers. Secondly, I am using RAID as you mentioend for High availabiity and also prevent ouotage due to disk failure. I did not factor in ReadyNAS going down. 

 

So all I need is to now replicate my ReadyNAS on the cloud. Can Crashplan automatically backup ReadyNAS or does it only work with PCs/Laptops?

Message 6 of 16
StephenB
Guru

Re: How much Redundancy for safety?


@vfpeter wrote:

Can Crashplan automatically backup ReadyNAS or does it only work with PCs/Laptops?


CrashPlan is installed on my Pro-6 (running 4.2.31 firmware).  It isn't the simplest package to install, and I did need to upgrade the memory on the pro to keep it humming.

 

If I ever need to re-do this, I will run CrashPlan on a PC, and map the NAS data volume to a drive letter.  The "unofficial" solution titled CrashPlan app version 4.3 and later is simple to deploy ( https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Backup/Back_up_files_from_a_Windows_network_drive )

 


@vfpeter wrote:

 

@StephenB, Is Crashplan better than dropbox or google drive. I see that cost wise it beats both the other cloud services. 

 

Frankly, I was drawn in by the price, and I still think its a great deal.  

  • It's terms of service explicitly allow NAS.
  • Storage is unlimited 
  • Files are encrypted,
  • Backed up files are versioned (so you can get back older copies if you need them).

It doesn't do sync though - if that's what you want you'll need to go with a different provider.

 

I've needed support a couple of times, and even though installing it in a NAS isn't supported by them, they still were able/willing to help.

 

Overall I've found it to be reliable, my issues were related to not having enough memory in the pro.  It's file deduplication approach is efficient, but it is memory intensive.  Though so far I haven't needed to do a full restore (though I have retrieved individual files).

 

Of course you do need a good uplink speed in order to make effective use of cloud backup (and no uplink data cap).  When I started using it I think I had a 50 mbit uplink speed - which was enough.

 


@vfpeter wrote:

 

 

Also, the reason I am using ReadyNAS is so that I have a centralized store for my images and other data fiels at home. I do not want to again have it on all the computers.


That's my reason too. I do back up our PCs to it also, but for most of our data the ReadyNAS is the primary storage.

 

Message 7 of 16
vfpeter
Tutor

Re: How much Redundancy for safety?


@StephenB wrote:

If I ever need to re-do this, I will run CrashPlan on a PC, and map the NAS data volume to a drive letter.

  I was thinking the same.



@StephenB wrote:

Frankly, I was drawn in by the price, and I still think its a great deal.  

  • It's terms of service explicitly allow NAS.
  • Storage is unlimited 
  • Files are encrypted,
  • Backed up files are versioned (so you can get back older copies if you need them).

It doesn't do sync though - if that's what you want you'll need to go with a different provider.


Thanks for sharing this @StephenB
 

 


@StephenB wrote:

Of course you do need a good uplink speed in order to make effective use of cloud backup (and no uplink data cap).  When I started using it I think I had a 50 mbit uplink speed - which was enough.


 I have ATT GigaPower. I get 700 Mbps to 900 Mbps. So no worries here... 😉

 

 

 

 

Message 8 of 16
JBDragon1
Virtuoso

Re: How much Redundancy for safety?

How valuable is your data?  That will decide how much backup you need.   I have some of my Data backed up using Carbonite.  Thisis stuff like Text files, and pictures and some ofmy paid for app's.   Things like that.  So it's not a tone of data to upload.

 

I have almost 14TB of storage space on my NAS, that's not going into the cloud.  That would be so costly.   But you could upload to another Remote NAS as a backup and off site.  I have a 1TB CAP with Comcast.  If I used all my Data to backup to my off site NAS, it would take almost 14 months.    That's just silly.  I guess I could pay another $50 a month to get unlimited service back again.  Then Upload away.

 

I'm backing up to Bare HDD's, which I then pop into a plastic case and stick into my Fire Safe, which is bolted down.    So someone can't just easily haul it away. Things can happen.  You could be robbed and someone steals your NAS.   Your Nas could break down, maybe curupt your data any number of ways.  Maybe it catches file or your house burns down for some other reason.  Being able to swap out a failed HDD doens't help with any of those other things.   

 

So off site is a smart move.  1 or more backup copies.     If for example, your job is a photographer, and you took wedding Pictures.  There's no do over!!!  You better make sure you have lots of backup solutions.  A NAS lets you have access to a lot of Data in a single place.  If a HDD does fail, you can still continue to use the NAS until you have a new HDD to pop in and be good to go full speed once again until the next HDD fails.  That could be 1 month or 10 years.   How much if the Data on your NAS worth to you, or your buisness?  

 

I really don't think there's such a thing as to many backup's!!!  My pictures for example as on my NAS, but they're also on Google and Amazon which is free to put my pictures on, and Carbonite is also backing them up automatically.   That's at least 4 locations.  I've lost some pictures in the past.  No more!!!  

 

 

Message 9 of 16
vfpeter
Tutor

Re: How much Redundancy for safety?

I was in trial period with Crashplan and was going to subscribe their Home solution. Today I got an email saying this:

 

"Code42 has made a decision to shift our business strategy to focus on the enterprise and small business markets. Over the next 14 months, we will be exiting the consumer market and CrashPlan for Home will no longer be available or supported after that time."

 

I am trying out BackBlaze now. If I like it, I will subscribe to it. 

Message 10 of 16
StephenB
Guru

Re: How much Redundancy for safety?


@vfpeter wrote:

 

"Code42 has made a decision to shift our business strategy to focus on the enterprise and small business markets. Over the next 14 months, we will be exiting the consumer market and CrashPlan for Home will no longer be available or supported after that time."

 


Similar to the email I received.  They then go on to recommend their SMB backup service.  Though it does cost 2x, I think I could also use it to back up some PCs as well as the NAS.  I'm not sure yet, but I'm inclined to switch over.

Message 11 of 16
vfpeter
Tutor

Re: How much Redundancy for safety?

What's the best solution for NAS?

I was going to use the regular BackBlaze account, but saw that it does not backup network drives. So even if I mapped a drive on my laptop to NAS, I cannot back that up. 

 

The regular account has this restriction:

"It cannot be used as offsite data archival or offsite storage for data that will not be retained on the licensed computer"

I just want a backup of my NAS (2 TB) which is in RAID mode with additional 2TB drive. 

 

Should I go for the B2 account for my home NAS?

Message 12 of 16
JBDragon1
Virtuoso

Re: How much Redundancy for safety?

So you only have 2TB of storage on your NAS?  Is that 2 1TB drives?  Or it is 2 2TB drives in RAID 1?

 Raid 1 is really basically a CLONE.  What's on 1 HDD, will be on the other HDD.  In a way it's kind of a Backup.  When you move to RAID 5 or something else and Data is spread about on other drives which makes a Backup is even more Important.

 

Of course other things can happen.  Maybe someone steals that NAS from you.   Or you have a FIRE.    Off site for a backup is always BEST.  But 2 TB's into the cloud is kind of pushing things.  I have Comcast and they have a 1TB Max limit per month, so if I did nothing else but backup 2 TB, it would take 2 months, Minimum.  Upload Speed is slower then Download speed by quite a bit also.   What I was doing is putting a Backup HDD, in my Case 2 8TB drives into a HDD Dock, and then copying the files over to that, then popping the drives into these HDD Cases and popping those into my Fire Safe.   I have 13TB of Data and it was just a Hassle.  So I just got a new/used Cheap NAS,  It's a 4 Bay QNAP Unit, and I've popped my 2 8TB drives into it and made it a RAID0.   There's no redundancy.  It's basically 1 big HDD.  But that shouldn't matter as It's a BACKUP.  Then I'm using rsync beteen the 2 units.   Right this minute my files and being copied over.    The Nice thing is it's all automatic.  I have this NAS in a completly differnt location in my House.  If I wanted to though, after this huge Backup, I could bring it to some other external source that wasn't my house and link them up to continue doing it's thing.  Those backups would be a fraction of the size, just whatever is new.   If I had to restore, I could just bring it back home which is again much faster then gover over the Internet and also not wasting all my Data.    Besides it would take 13+ months at 1TB a month and doing nothing else.   That's just silly.

 

In your case, 2TB is nothing.  a single HDD that's at least 2TB is size you can backup to would be simple.  You can can get a bare drive Dock for pretty cheap that's USB, Plug that into your NAS USB port and then go and setup the Backup to use that in the ReadyNAS backup section.  It's not going to be a CLONE, You're backing up the Data in the folders you're using.  

 

I also use Carbonite for Off-Site Backup.  It's Automatic and backs up whatever folders I have it set to like my Documents and Pictures because I don't want to lose those at all for any reason.  It just runs in the background doing it's thing and I never worry about it once it's setup and doing it's thing.  

 

But Ya this QNAP, kind of cheap.  Plastic HDD bays.  Have to screw mount the drives.  It's ARM and so really not that speedy compaired to my Upgraded ReadyNAS 516.  It only seems to want to go around 27MB/s on my Gigabit Network.  I can pretty much Max out my Gigabit Network going from my Windows 10 PC to my 516.  So this backup is not exacly FAST!!!  But it really doesn't matter.  it could take a week for all I care.  After that it'll be quick to just backup what's changed.  I'm also not sure if the HDD's I'm using are part of the speed issue.  Because they are these 8TB Seagate Archive Drives.  Not good drives to use for a normal NAS.  But again, this QNAP is really only for my Backup anyway.  The Data is not going to be erased and rewritten and changed over and over again.   I would NEVER using them in my 516.  They are cheap, and even more so if you get them in the external Backup case instead of the more expensive Bare drive!!!  Then you rip them of them external cases and now you have saved $40 or or so.   Doesn't make much sense, but there you go.

 

Really, with only 2TB to backup, there's a number of ways to go.  If you wanted to you could just buy a External HDD in a case.  A 2TB one would be cheap.  Get one from Amazon or Costco, whatever.  Plug the USB cable into the NAS and setup the backup and copy everything to it and then don't leave that HDD there!!!  Again, Fire or theft or whatever, you don't want all your eggs in 1 basket.    Once a week or 2 weeks or however much your Data changes, grab that external drive, plug it in and update the backup. which should be a lot faster and it should only need to copy over anything new, and then pull it and put it away someplace safe.   Fire Safe like I was, or Off-Site if that's possible.  Then bring it home to backup.

 

If your Data is REALLY, REALLY Imporant, say your a photographer, and you take wedding pictures.   There's no DO OVER!!!  The Last thing you want to do is ever lose those pictures.  This is where is's a good Idea to have a second Backup.    How valuable is your Data?  You at least want 1 backup, and that's hard enough for a lot of people to even do.    I know, which is why I got this QNAP.  This takes me out of the picture and it'll do it on it's own every day.  See how LAZY I am.  Spend a little money to be lazy!!!

 

As for BackBlaze, I have heard of them not long ago.  I did find this, which may be of help

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/media-archive-solutions/

 

Message 13 of 16
StephenB
Guru

Re: How much Redundancy for safety?


@vfpeter wrote:

What's the best solution for NAS?

I was going to use the regular BackBlaze account, but saw that it does not backup network drives. So even if I mapped a drive on my laptop to NAS, I cannot back that up.  

Should I go for the B2 account for my home NAS?


I agree that there are a lot of options, and of course the cost does depend on how much data you have to back up.  I have approximately 10 TiB.  One thing to watch out for - two-way sync doesn't really provide a backup, since if anything happens to the cloud repository, it propagates back to the NAS.  So if you use sync, make sure it's one way.

 

I took advantage of the Crashplan offer to switch my home backup account to their business plan.  Crashplan Pro is now hosted on a Windows PC (which I am using generally as an application server), with the NAS data volume mapped to a drive letter.   That is allowed under their license agreement (and Crashplan support was fine with it when I discussed the conversion with them).

 

Unfortunately my home Crashplan backup was too large for them to migrate, so I am starting over with a from-scratch backup.

 

 

Message 14 of 16
JBDragon1
Virtuoso

Re: How much Redundancy for safety?

Glad you figured something out.  That's going to take a while to Upload all that Data to them.   I have Comcast with 200Mbps Download and 10Mbps Upload.  Yet a 1TB Cap.  That much Data would take 10 months if I maxed out my CAP every month just for that.  I got another NAS.  Nothing fancy.  It's for Home after all, and am using rsync locally, and even that I'm only getting about 27-29Mb/s  That's what it's telling me.  This cheap ARM NAS is not a speed machine.  It's still 3 times faster then what my Upload Speed would be and It's beeing backing up my 13TB of Data for the last 3 days.  It's a little over half full now.  If I was sending all this over Comcast, it would be at 9 days so far.  That's 24 hours a day.  I think I have another 2 days to go.  Or 15 days over Comcast If they would let me, which they wouldn't.  It would take me 13 months at 1TB CAP a month doing nothing else.  That's just crazy and not pratical for me.  I guess I could pay Comcast the extra $50 a month to get Unlimited Back, but Unlimited still is not unlimited and I'm sure they'd start doing something like slowing my speed way down after so many TB's if not canceling service.

 

I know some of these company's will send you a HDD with all your Data on it because it's so much faster.  Download speed is way, way faster then Upload speed.  I'm not sure if any of them offer that service the other way around.

 

Message 15 of 16
StephenB
Guru

Re: How much Redundancy for safety?


@JBDragon1 wrote:

That's going to take a while to Upload all that Data to them. 


It's done 1.5 TB so far (140-150 GB/day).  That's slower than I expected - I have an 880 mbps upload speed with no cap - so it is limited by their cloud.  I probably should have manually cut down the home backup to 5 TB and then "adopted" it on the new server - but that didn't occur to me at the time.

 

Still, it will finish in about 8 weeks or so, and the speed might pick up.  This is my disaster recovery plan, I still have my local NAS backups.

 


@JBDragon1 wrote:

 

I know some of these company's will send you a HDD with all your Data on it because it's so much faster.  Download speed is way, way faster then Upload speed.  I'm not sure if any of them offer that service the other way around. 


My service happens to be symmetric.  

 

Crashplan did have an optional seeding option when I first signed up (2012), but I think now it is limited to Crashplan Enterprise.   Back in 2012 it didn't make sense for me - there was a 1 TB hard drive limit, which takes me about a week to back up over the internet.

 

 

 

 

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