Hi and My storage problem

[BonnyTideTimes]

HI all,

 

I'm Jon an Englishman living in South Africa at the moment. I have a data storage problem to solve and moving from a country where anything is available to a country where choice is not as great  has made things less straight forward. My Synology NAS has failed. It is an older model and this has focused my mind on how vulnerable our data is and I need to sort something out.

 

My wife is an amateur photographer, she has basically accumulated 16 TB of photos (Most in RAW format) a lot of which is family photos of our kids growing up. On top of this I need to back up our workstations and try and get data organized between our family unit of 4. Also, I have a relatively small library of movies which are mainly DVD rips. These are played via PLEX (I have lifetime pass) to our AppleTV. My wifes data is stored on DROBO Thunderbolt connected to her iMAC. It is quite a few years old and I have no secondary back up of it and she is currently running low on space (it has 5 4TB drives). Whilst I have told my wife to start converting her photos to High Quality JPEG this is going to take a lot of time and also she just looks at me strangely 🙂 so I guess it up to me to sort it.

 

How do I approach this?

1) Do i build 2 servers lower power and cost and duplicate them knowing 1 will eventually fail. or

2) The local computer shop has quoted for two QNAP NAS. This doesn't feel right to me from the perspective of cost and serviceability. or

3) I have desktop in a Fractal Design case, i7-8700k cpu on a Asus prime z-370-p motherboard, 16gb ram and GeForce GTX 1060 3GB. It has plenty of space for drives. This is currently used as my desktop running UbuntuMATE and Windows10. But would I need to build another server for redundancy? I could buy a reasonably low powered desktop for replacement for me i only play the odd game of DOTA now and then.

 

Having done my research UnRaid seems the best option for me if I go self build, with the most flexibility. I have a slow cobbled together home network using Devolo plugs so read right speeds are going to be restricted anyway and an ASUS router.  This leads to considering how to get 16TB off DROBO on to the solution reasonably quickly.

 

I am going round in circles on this now, just need to make decision and do it. Couldn't cope with losing all our family memories.

 

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks

Jon

 

 

 

 

 

 

[testdasi]

I read your post as "Hi, I'm Johnny English..." 🤣

 

I would pick option 3. I would recommend getting a Gigabyte motherboard instead of Asus. Gigabyte BIOS has the Initial Display Output setting which gives you flexibility picking which GPU Unraid boots with, which in turns makes life easier to pass through the GTX.

 

Now I don't understand your point about needing 2 servers for redundancy. What form of redundancy are you after here?

 

Does your Drobo has a USB out (i.e. to use it like a USB external drive)? If so, that would be the fastest way to get data off it, assuming you are doing some forms of RAID with the Drobo.

[trurl]

1 hour ago, BonnyTideTimes said:

I have no secondary back up of it

Do you mean you have no backup? Or do you just mean you want an additional backup? 

[BonnyTideTimes]

32 minutes ago, testdasi said:

I read your post as "Hi, I'm Johnny English..." 🤣

 

I would pick option 3. I would recommend getting a Gigabyte motherboard instead of Asus. Gigabyte BIOS has the Initial Display Output setting which gives you flexibility picking which GPU Unraid boots with, which in turns makes life easier to pass through the GTX.

 

Now I don't understand your point about needing 2 servers for redundancy. What form of redundancy are you after here?

 

Does your Drobo has a USB out (i.e. to use it like a USB external drive)? If so, that would be the fastest way to get data off it, assuming you are doing some forms of RAID with the Drobo.

🤣  I'm sometimes as accident prone as Johnny English according to others.

 

Yes, I think option 3 would be best for me and it's been sitting in front of me all along. Thanks for advice on Gigabyte. Any recommendations?

 

OK, Maybe this is where I'm being a bit 'Johnny' 🤣 but I am worried about having all my critical data on one box (although 10times better than what I have now). Unless I archive off photos onto removable disks. Don't really want to use cloud as with that volume of DATA it would be quite expensive and of course privacy.

 

The DROBO looks like it has USB 3.0 Standard-A plug on the back as well as a spare thunderbolt port, so yes your right that would be best way to transfer data.

 

[BonnyTideTimes]

44 minutes ago, trurl said:

Do you mean you have no backup? Or do you just mean you want an additional backup? 

I have no backup of the DROBO 16TB. It has been very reliable for a good few years now. So any new NAS/Server would provide main store of critical DATA. As stated in above post just worried about have one server of critical data in case it fails.

[trurl]

1 hour ago, BonnyTideTimes said:

I have no backup of the DROBO 16TB. It has been very reliable for a good few years now. So any new NAS/Server would provide main store of critical DATA. As stated in above post just worried about have one server of critical data in case it fails.

Still unclear to me though. Is the DROBO itself your backup, or it is the only copy of these important and irreplaceable files? 

[BonnyTideTimes]

33 minutes ago, trurl said:

Still unclear to me though. Is the DROBO itself your backup, or it is the only copy of these important and irreplaceable files? 

Sorry for confusion, it is the only copy of these files.  It uses 'beyond RAID' I believe.

[testdasi]

2 hours ago, BonnyTideTimes said:

OK, Maybe this is where I'm being a bit 'Johnny' 🤣 but I am worried about having all my critical data on one box (although 10times better than what I have now). Unless I archive off photos onto removable disks. Don't really want to use cloud as with that volume of DATA it would be quite expensive and of course privacy.

I would suggest you keep the Drobo as the backup of what is on the new server.

Given you have 16TB over presumably many years, you definitely want to have a backup.

 

Just as a guide, remember the "Four-O":

1. Original copy
2. Online copy to protect against, for example, a drive failure
3. Offline copy to protect against, for example, a power surge or a cryptovirus infection
4. Offsite copy to protect against, for example, a house fire

The diff between Offline and Online is whether the storage device is off + disconnected most of the time (e.g. an external HDD) or on / connected most of the time (e.g. an always-on NAS server). Offsite is generally the cloud but it could simply be an external HDD kept at a relative's place.

 

So generally, your most critical data should have at least "Two-O"

First O should be either (1) or (2).

Second O (the backup) should be either (3) or (4).

 

You only have "One-O" of your most critical data. That's not recommended.

I have almost 5TB of data I consider most critical and they have the full "Four-O".

 

 

In terms of costs for cloud backup, it's actually not that expensive e.g. Backblaze costs $60/year last I checked.

Also, you don't have to be concerned about privacy. Data is encrypted or can be encrypted. Backblaze, for example, even offers Private Encryption Key, which makes it impossible for anyone but you to decrypt the files.

Note: I'm not endorsing Backblaze in anyway and personally use Google (Business) Drive. I just use Backblaze as an example since they are a major service provider.

Edited March 4, 2020 by testdasi

[trurl]

46 minutes ago, BonnyTideTimes said:

Sorry for confusion, it is the only copy of these files.  It uses 'beyond RAID' I believe.

RAID or Unraid (or BeyondRAID) is NEVER a substitute for backups.