Hey guys:

 

Let me start off by saying you all are very helpful, and I appreciate all the help. 

 

I am going to be building an Unraid server sometime in the near future (as soon as I come up with $$ for some HDDs) for all my DVDs, Blu-rays, music, and photos.  I am going to repurpose my 4 year old HP Pavilion a6110n.  I think I am going to gut it and use a different case I was looking at the XCLIO Nighthawk because it can hold more HDDs and the reviews said it has very good ventilation.  I was thinking of start off with 3 SAMSUNG EcoGreen F4 HD204UI 2TB. 

 

I know that there is some redundancies built into Unraid, however, what backup strategies should I employ to backup the info on the NAS?  It takes so long to convert Blu-rays to MKVs I don’t want to have to go through that process again.  What should I do?

 

Any and all comments welcome.

 

Thanks

 

It's all based on your budget.  If you own the blu-rays, then that is your backup. If you want to backup the converted files, then you would rsync them to another local hard drive, another local unRAID server, or an offsite unRAID server.

 

I would only backup that which I cannot recreate unless I had the extra funds in the budge to duplicate everything.

For example. I duplicate all my mp3's/flacs/documents/source code because I do DJ'ing on the side and I can not recreate all the documents and source code again.

For DVD that I own, I would have to rip and re-encode them.

If it was really a pain to do that again, I would build another server and rsync them on some frequency.

 

Currently. I rsync the important folders to other machines (music to my stereo XBMC machine and DJ laptop).

Documents rsynced in a historical arrangement to another filesystem and an external drive.

 

While it's convenient to have a jukebox of movies, how often do you watch the same movie over and over.

For A children's library, I would probably duplicate it, but for regular movies I've watched, I would not (but that's my personal choice).

As Weebotech says, its partly down to budget, partly down to personal preference.  I have two unRAID servers.  One is powered up 24/7 and is optimised for low power consumption.  All important stuff can be put on to that at any time that I want a copy outside of my PC (or the family's PCs).  Media (CD, DVD and Blu-ray rips) are also kept on that server.  I happen to keep another copy of the audio rips on my PC, but not DVDs or Blu-rays.  Then as needed I generally use Synctoy to back up groups of folders or drives from my PC to the first server and everything on that server then has the benefit of parity protection once moved from the cache drive to the array.  Synctoy allows me to preview additions and deletions from the PC before I commit them to the backup.

 

My other unRAID server is basically for backing up the first, and is made to be reasonably quick, but inexpensive, with power consumption a secondary consideration.  As a manual process, once a week or once a fortnight, I will power up the backup server.  I have a simple script which I run on the first server which uses rsync to then echo any differences in files and folders to the backup server - in my case that includes deletions.  Some people choose not to backup deletions, so that the backup always accumulates files.  My view is that to back up deletions is fine so long as it is not automated. (Automated backup of deleted folders is a good way to lose large amounts of data very quickly if for some reason you aren't aware that a folder has been deleted.) 

 

It's a balance.  I would not have gone to these lengths in the past, taking the view that I can re-rip stuff.  Now I think that I just have too much time invested not to have a good backup.  Of course, some one else would have their back up in a shed at the end of the garden, or off-site at a completely different location.  I am not yet at that stage.  I think that if the house burns down I will have bigger problems to be concerned with.

Another fairly simple strategy I'll throw in the mix:

 

For relatively small data (documents, photos, etc), you can manually duplicate data across different unRAID disks.  For example, say you have 10 GB of family photos that you can't afford to lose.  You can also achieve a simple duplication on your unRAID server using the disk includes/excludes options in unRAID's user shares.  Simply create a share named 'photos' that includes disk1 (and therefore excludes all others).  Then create another share called 'photos backup' that includes disk2 (and excludes all others).  Once per week, use TeraCopy or another file handler to copy the contents of 'photos' into 'photos backup'.  Now, if you lose two drives simultaneously you have smaller chance of losing both drives that contain your photos.  This same concept can be applied to as many data disks as you have, so you can make up to 21 redundant copies of small data if desired (assuming one copy is on a cache disk).  This process could also be automated.

 

Note that you still need some form of off-site backup, since no amount of redundancy within your server will protect your data from a fire or flood.  I recommend using Crashplan to back up to a friend's computer.

Another fairly simple strategy I'll throw in the mix:

 

For relatively small data (documents, photos, etc), you can manually duplicate data across different unRAID disks.  For example, say you have 10 GB of family photos that you can't afford to lose.  You can also achieve a simple duplication on your unRAID server using the disk includes/excludes options in unRAID's user shares.  Simply create a share named 'photos' that includes disk1 (and therefore excludes all others).  Then create another share called 'photos backup' that includes disk2 (and excludes all others).  Once per week, use TeraCopy or another file handler to copy the contents of 'photos' into 'photos backup'.  Now, if you lose two drives simultaneously you have smaller chance of losing both drives that contain your photos.  This same concept can be applied to as many data disks as you have, so you can make up to 21 redundant copies of small data if desired (assuming one copy is on a cache disk).  This process could also be automated.

 

Note that you still need some form of off-site backup, since no amount of redundancy within your server will protect your data from a fire or flood.  I recommend using Crashplan to back up to a friend's computer.

 

This is exactly what I do for my documents and images (photos), scans, etc, etc.

 

Only I use rsync with the linked-dest option to create a dated historical copy of these directories.

 

See my script on here called rsync_linked_backup.

http://code.google.com/p/unraid-weebotech/downloads/list

 

My current strategy is to use part of the RAID1 cache as /home for my workstations.

Then I do a dated rsync with --linked-dest to a parity protected drive.

 

I plan to move the RAID1 cache folder to an SSD on the server just so I don't have the drive's spinning all the time.

But I'll still do the dated backups.

 

The only thing I have not automated is the cleanup of the backup directories.

 

In any case, with the rsync dated directories and link-dest, you only have 1 copy of the file until you change it. then you have as many copies as you have changed it until you start to delete the older backups.

 

You can go back to any point in time just by navigating to the folder.