Hey guys, I am an owner of a small company who needs to improve the storage management of the company. I got the idea of a storage device from a friend of mine. I am not very familiar with technology but I will try to explain the situation as best as I can. We are currently using one server where we keep the files we work with and a lot of video files which we need for our business. The video files are kept for archive purposes and every time a HDD is full we turn the server off and swap the HDD with another one. This and the lack of backup make the situation uncomfortable. So I got this idea and would like to ask if it is possible – I’d like to get a ReadyNAS® Pro 4, 8TB Unified Storage System. I will use it to put the captured video files on one of the HDDs and have a RAID backup of it one another one. When the first HDD is full I will put it to the archive, I will buy new one and format the RAID backup disk in order to use it as backup for the new disk. I’d like to use the third of the HDDs as a place where we keep our work files and use the last of the HDDs as an empty slot where I will be able to hot-swap HDDs with previous backup files and copy some of them to the HDD with the work files. I hope you get the idea. Do you think it is possible and if not why and what other product could I use. Thanks for your help, Kalin
This is strongly discouraged. RAID is not a backup. RAID provides redundancy or high availability and was never designed to be treated as a backup. See Preventing Catastrophic Data Loss
If you want to backup you should backup to a USB disk, another NAS or some place else.
Thanks for your welcome! I think I did not put it clear in my previous post. The situation is like this - we capture several radio and TV stations. The files are recorded on a HDD. When the HDD is full I remove it, put it in a safe place and put another HDD. I need the RAID just in case something goes wrong with the HDD during capturing and I will not lose the data on the broken HDD. It happened onece or twice befor and I think that if I had a RAID I wouldn't have lost the data from a 2TB HDD. After the HDD is full and I swap it with the new one, I will format the RAID disk with the old data and use it again. Am I correct or I still can not use the RAID for this? Thanks, Kalin
