I’m familiar with needing more than 1 basket its the needing 5 baskets that surprised me.
Oh, getting everything talking can be a big hassle. All of the talk of backup and redundancy is to cover you for what happens when a drive dies. All hard drives (spinning and solid state) die. It is only a question of when, and is it annoying or catastrophic?
A RAID protects you against drive failure, and possibly let’s you continue working with no downtime. Backups protect you from two things:
First, is major failure of your server. Does malwate wipe it out, does that idiot new hire delete everything, does a pipe burst and flood it, etc?
Second, and in my experience the far, far more common use of backups is to recover from small human errors. Oops, did you overwrite the 2018 spreadsheet with 2019, did that idiot hire only delete a few files this time, did Word corrupt that report again? Recover those files from backup.
The reason to have an offsite backup is to protect against things like fire, flood, theft, vandalism, etc. Should that water leak be disruptive and annoying until insurance comes through, or business ending because all the data is gone?
Oh yeah, backups really should be automated. Anything that requires manual intervention will fail on the human side, unless you’re very disciplined. Carrying an external drive home is fine, but then you need three: A attached to the server, B idle at the office, and C at home. Then put B on the server, take A home, and C back in the morning. Way easier to just have backup software that sends your data someplace.
Backup, backup, backup!
You can never have enough backups, but you sure can have that one you don’t have contain all the data you really need now! On another forum, I’ve shared tales of how I’ve had multiple terabytes of data disappear because I pressed the wrong button or knocked my external drive off the desk right after I used it as a backup. Backups are not a place to skimp!
Cloud storage like Dropbox is okay as a second backup, but keep in mind that your upload speed is usually a fraction of your download speed. So if you have 100/10 Mb/s internet, your upload speed is ~10x slower than your download. So a 1 GB file will take ~10-15 minutes without any other internet activity going on*. This is usually done during off hours late at night. Same with connecting from home. Versus <~10 seconds to transfer the file to an external drive or even better, an internal that you use in a hotswap bay on your server. Look up posts under my nick on Videohelp if you want my detailed concerns about external drives.** Also, AFAIK, Cloud Storage doesn’t allow any kind of file verification, which you can and should do with when backing up your files.
*The salesguy who was trying to sell us on cloud storage casually mentioned that it would several months to upload the several terabytes of data we had to backup since it had to be done during off-hours.
**The good news is LaCie makes quality enclosures (with Seagate drives inside) and is one of few off the shelf externals I would even consider recommending.
Offsite storage is exactly that. Keeping a copy of your data somewhere that away from your business because in addition to not “Keeping all your eggs in one basket” as Dewey Finn said, you don’t want to keep the in the same henhouse either!
You don’t have to make a second backup at work, but take the backup home and copy (and verify) the data to at least one other drive, optical discs, tape, whatever you may choice immediately. Sure there’s a possibility that your car may catch on fire on the way home at the same time your business is broken into, but IME, the possibility of something going wrong (internet or power outage) during a multi-hour backup via the web is far more likely.
My experience is the opposite. company backups are for restoring the data on the server. And those backups aren’t done realtime. The best you’ll get is whatever was saved at 12 midnight the before and IT will likely ignore your request since they’re not going to search for your file out of the tens of thousands files on the backup.
Which brings up another reason I don’t believe in working on or saving files directly on a server. Unlike your local PC, if you overwrite or delete a file on a server over the network it’s gone for good! There’s no Recycle Bin for network accessed files. Even Excel and Word’s autosave can recover the previous version of the file.
How valuable is it to keep your data and business running? Hard drives are at a historic low. Two additional 1TB drives will cost you less than $150. Probably less than a day’s pay for one of your employees.
BTW, SSDs and flash drives are NOT for archiving or backups. Unlike regular hard drives, when they fail, they typically fail without warning and take everything with it in one go. While it may be possible to recover the data from a failed SSD or flash drives, the chances are low (think there’s currently only one company that even offers SSD recovery) and way more expensive than regular hard drive recovery and way, way more expensive than having a proper backup.
Edit: Even Excel and Word’s autosave can’t recover the previous version of the file.
Sorry for the flood of posts, but I can’t emphasize the importance of backups and caution about RAID enough. One of the biggest tech guys on Youtube, Linus from Linus Tech Tips, nearly lost 20TB of data when the RAID controller on one of the servers failed in the middle of a backup. All of our data is GONE! - YouTube"]K8k
BTW, Linus currently has over 1 Petabyte of storage. Imagine backing that up!*
*Actually, part of that petabyte is backup.
Last post for now, I promise.
Run Crystaldiskinfo on all your drives immediately. If any of the buttons are yellow or red, your drive prone to failure soon. I may be hours, days, weeks or months, but it will fail. Replace it now, even if you have to take the cost from something else you want for your office. Heck, sell off your gaming video card if you still have it!
The NAS device you get will have some kind of RAID, and some kind of cloud backup, and a bunch of other stuff you may or may not want.
The cost of a good NAS is mostly (but not entirely) the cost of the disks you put in it. You can start with 4 1TB disks, and later upgrade to 4x 4TB or or 4 X 8TB if you need it. You should, of course, get NAS disks (for example WD red) for your NAS.
Most of the stuff on my NAS doesn’t need daily backups. I back up the important stuff to one of the other computers, and to a USB disk. I backup the other computers (which are not important) to the NAS, so the NAS has a lot of space filled with stuff that doesn’t need to be backed up daily.
Of course, it’s entirely up to you. But imagine your office is downtown and you maintain the backups at home, a few miles outside town. That sounds fine and in most circumstances probably is but what if you lived in Paradise, California, where pretty much the entire town was consumed by wildfire? Both your office and your home might well have been lost.
As said, hard drives are cheap and online storage is also relatively cheap.
Like any backup solution, when choosing cloud storage, don’t skimp on costs. The big boys, Google, Amazon, Backblaze, may not be the cheapest, but they’re not likely to disappear overnight. Like any bubble, which cloud storage is now, it will eventually burst, taking a lot of companies with it.
Don’t forget to test the restore of the backup…
There is nothing like having no quick way to get your critical data back.
This is what copy-on-write snapshoting file systems are for. I take a snapshot of my server every 5 minutes (or every 10 seconds if I feel like it), and push those snapshots across campus to a backup server. If I need to recover a file created an hour ago, and just now deleted, I can do that. Those 5 minute snapshots age out after a day, and I do have archival backups which save a nightly snapshot for months or years.
If IT won’t recover a file, then what do they think their job is? Of course, a user saying, “I need a file I deleted sometime this summer, or maybe as early as March, and I don’t know the name of it, or where it was, but it had some stuff in it about the 2016 receipts…” Yeah, that’s not coming back. Somebody saying, “I accidentally saved over 2017-receipts.xlsx, instead of copying it,” will get their file restored in a few minutes.
Additionally, if you have a backup method in which previous backups become corrupted when a single backup fails, then that isn’t really backup, just data transfer masturbation.
It sounds like you’re preforming realtime snapshots of your own personal files stored on your own personal server which is okay when it’s just you or a handful of users. At the companies I’ve worked at have dozens of users accessing the server at any given moment and that’s practical because of additional overhead on the server. Backups are one once a day late at night and it takes hours to complete and restore. Even longer when the data is sent transferred offsite.
Universities typically have superfast internet, often the fastest available. This isn’t true for many businesses who don’t even pay for the top tier commercial internst.
Don’t take any advice from Linus Tech Tips. They’re nothing more than entertainment for gamers. Their server ‘experience’ consists of things like cutting into server motherboards to refit them with inappropriate heatsinks, repeatedly destroying motherboards in the process. Their RAID debacle consisted of running a dangerous configuration with no backups and inappropriate consumer-level hardware. They are a joke. RAID is for availability and capacity. It is unavoidable if one wants more than a single disk’s worth of capacity, which you do.
I have been the sysadmin for a computational biology laboratory and responsible for maintaining over 250 TB of networked storage and deploying automated backup systems for it. Business-critical storage should not be DIY’ed with consumer hardware and software. Your business’s integrity depends on this.
I strongly recommend enlisting the services of a local MSP (managed service provider) to consult over the best options for your business. This is one of those things that means the difference between recovering from a loss and instantly going out of business. If you read through sysadmin forums you will find many stories of businesses suddenly on the brink of closure because of a ransomware outbreak or NAS failure with insufficient backups. There is a lot more to storage integrity than throwing money at a NAS. You need to have business support options lined up so you can handle any outages efficiently. This is an insurance type of evaluation. How much money will you lose for each hour or day of downtime relative to money saved with inappropriate, cheaper, hardware? Buying an off the shelf NAS can be a start, but you still need professional support backing it, whether the vendor offers business support (not all do, cough, cough, Synology) or through a third-party integrator.
Even if the backups are sent off-site only once per day, why not keep a day or two’s worth of snapshots on the server? How much additional data does this generate in your company’s case that this would be unwieldy?
Thank you hopping in here. Please confirm/refute anything I’ve said* so hopefully the OP understand the importances of having everything, hardware and software be high priority when budgeting business expenses. Over at videohelp.com, not a week goes by without someone posting, “Help, I’ve lost my data and I don’t have a backup!”
*My opinions and experiences are based on people thinking I can play “sysadmin” just because I’ve been fooling around with PCs for decades. I’ve setup and maintained simple peer to peer networks and can understand about 50% of what the IT people are talking about. But when I’m asked by the pros (over the phone or online) to help them provide info about what’s going on, I always say, I know enough to figure out what’s probably going on, but not enough to fix it!
I agree Linus Tech Tips has some entertainment level content, but he brings networking and hardware issues/troubleshooting down to layman’s terms. Like anything I view on Youtube or read online, I double and triplecheck other sources before I make a purchase or start building.
At one of my last workplaces, I because good friends with a guy in IT. He was a few years out of college with a degree in Computer Science and when troubleshooting a PC in our area, I’d toss out a guess about what’s wrong or a possible fix. He’s look at me and ask: “How did you know that?”, I’d just laugh and say, “I’ve been fooling around with DOS and Windows PCs for longer than you’ve been alive!”. “Seen it, learned about it and fixed it!”. 