Backup solution for Home NAS

[linuxxo]

Hi,

I am new here, and I have been looking for something that may help with my requirements. I have already setup Unraid with a 12 TB disk for data and a 240 GB SSD for cache. I want to backup the entire content of the 12 TB disk, but I don't want to use external drives. I was thinking of getting another 12 TB disk for backups, install it internally, and then have a copy of ALL data from the primary disk. Would that be feasible? Is there a sort of mirroring option available? Also, in case of hardware or primary disk failure, I would like to be able to remove the backup disk and access the data from a Windows machine (using 3rd party tools to access the file system). Many thanks in advance.

[JorgeB]

9 hours ago, linuxxo said:

Would that be feasible?

If you want a real time copy you can add it as parity, with just one data device it will work as a mirror, if you want to manually sync the disk, you can leave it unassigned, note that the former is more for redundancy, not really a backup, and even the latter will have some extra risks by having the backup disk in the same physical server. 

[linuxxo]

Hi, many thanks for your reply. The thing I don't have clear is that if I add a 2nd drive as parity, and the primary disk fails, can I still access the data on the parity one? Or do I have to replace the failed disk and rebuild it from the parity one? I prefer to have an internal drive rather than an external one, as long as I can remove it in case of emergency and read the data from another machine.

[JorgeB]

1 hour ago, linuxxo said:

can I still access the data on the parity one?

Yes, with just a data drive parity will be a direct mirror.

[linuxxo]

Many thanks for the confirmation, I really appreciate it. I have seen that setup being mentioned, but it was never clarified what steps were required in case if failures. I am assuming that I can just add another drive of the same size and configure it as parity drive for the existing one, am I correct?

[JorgeB]

Correct 

[ChristianL]

But a (un)RAID is not a backup ? Isn't it ? You could still delete a file and it's gone from parity too. If you really mean an independent backup I would, in an easy case, use rsync to transfer files over to the other disc.  This way you might even have a different filesystem which then could be read on Windows (as you mentioned). 

I used rsync actually to copy my files from my old ESXi/freeBSD ZFS NAS over to my new unRAID server. Worked very well. 

Now I'm looking for how to make a little DVD/BD burner system for a more long-term archival. Not yet 100% sure how but likely a xcp-ng based linux VM connected via the 10GbE to pull data from unRAID and burn. But that might not work for your 12TB discs

 

Edited Sunday at 12:00 PM by ChristianL