Basically title. Is it common to use some kind of RAID for backing up other RAIDs or do people just go with single drives?

  • computergeek125@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    As others said, depends on your use case. There are lots of good discussions here about mirroring vs single disks, different vendors, etc. Some backup systems may want you to have a large filesystem available that would not be otherwise attainable without a RAID 5/6.

    Enterprise backups tend to fall along the recommendation called 3-2-1:

    • 3 copies of the data, of which
    • 2 are backups, and
    • 1 is off-site (and preferably offline)

    On my home system, I have 3-2-0 for most data and 4-3-0 for my most important virtual machines. My home system doesn’t have an off-site, but I do have two external hard drives connected to my NAS.

    • All devices are backed up to the NAS for fast recovery access between 1w and 24h RPO
    • The NAS backs up various parts of itself to the external hard drives every 24h
      • Data is split up by role and convenience factor - just putting stuff together like Tetris pieces, spreading out the NAS between the two drives
      • The most critical data for me to have first during a recovery is backed up to BOTH external disks
    • Coincidentally, both drives happen to be from different vendors, but I didn’t initially plan it that way, the Seagate drive was a gift and the WD drive was on sale

    Story time

    I had one of my two backup drives fail a few months ago. Literally actually nothing of value was lost, just went down to the electronics shop and bought a bigger drive from the same vendor (preserving the one on each vendor approach). Reformatted the disk, recreated the backup job, then ran the first transfer. Pretty much not a big deal, all the data was still in 2 other places - the source itself, and the NAS primary array.

    The most important thing to determine about a backup when you plan one - think about how much the data is valuable to you. That’s how much you might be willing to spend on keeping that data safe.