RAID1 - Independent Drives?

[CHiLL]

Hello,

I'm looking at our backup procedures and would like to ensure that our end of year backups are as thorough as they can be. We currently back up to a hard drive, which is stored in a fire safe. I've seen examples where an end of year backup was taken to a hard drive and stored in a fire safe. Then a couple of years later, data was required from that drive. However, during storage in the fire safe, the drive had failed during that time and data could not be recovered.

 

I'm wondering with the low price of drives, would backing up to two drives work? In theory, yes, however I'm not sure about the best way to do that. Our NAS device that we use for these fire safe backups can support hot-swappable drives and RAID1.

 

My question: Can RAID1 be used for this environment? The reason I'm asking is because if I am required to get data off the drive in the future, can I just plug the drive into a caddy and browse the data as normal, or is it dependent on the RAID array?

[Norphy]

Depends on the OS. Windows won't do software RAID with external drives, macOS and *nix will. You should be able to get USB/network attached enclosures which support RAID 1 in hardware.

 

That said, I would recommend tape storage for backups. Tapes are designed to be shifted about and archived like that and they're designed for long term storage. Hard disks, not so much.

[CHiLL]

Depends on the OS. Windows won't do software RAID with external drives, macOS and *nix will. You should be able to get USB/network attached enclosures which support RAID 1 in hardware.

 

That said, I would recommend tape storage for backups. Tapes are designed to be shifted about and archived like that and they're designed for long term storage. Hard disks, not so much.

Hmm, OK.

We use VEEAM to create our backups. I'd like to have VEEAM to copy to a secondary target which contains two drives. These drives will have the VEEAM data mirrored, so that I could remove and store the drives, but so I could also connect only one of the drives to a Windows machine later on to retrieve the VEEAM data. That way I browse that archive within VEEAM and retrieve the data as necessary.

[steveg]

Is there any advantage of having them set up in a raid array rather than just making the backup twice on 2 different drives?

[CHiLL]

Is there any advantage of having them set up in a raid array rather than just making the backup twice on 2 different drives?

I was thinking of automation. If I could have VEEAM trigger the backup copy once the EOY backup has completed and point it to the NAS (with two drives as RAID1) repository, then that makes it easier for me. Then all I need to do the next day is swap out the drives.

[Oaktech]

Is this not a great time to suggest cloud storage?

[pcstru]

I'm looking at our backup procedures and would like to ensure that our end of year backups are as thorough as they can be. We currently back up to a hard drive, which is stored in a fire safe. I've seen examples where an end of year backup was taken to a hard drive and stored in a fire safe. Then a couple of years later, data was required from that drive. However, during storage in the fire safe, the drive had failed during that time and data could not be recovered.

Hard Drives in a safe are not good bets for long term archival storage. The problem with HD's compared to tape is the component complexity means there are many failure modes and all of them are directly coupled to access to the data. Drives tend to fail on power up and there seems to be a fairly common belief that the longer drives are stored without being spun up, the more chance there is of failure.

 

If you do have to skimp on archival costs (and if you do, then you can't place much value on the data being archived) then use as many as you can, preferably from different manufacturers and re-write the data to fresh drives every year. I would not personally use RAID 1 without testing the drives are readable outside of the array. They should be but it's not an assumption that you want to test when you need the data.

 

NB - I am a little in the paranoid camp when it comes to data integrity and backup. On the downside that probably means we spend a little more than we perhaps could. On the upside I sleep well.

[ITGURU]

RAID 10 is usually good for data backups across 2 drives, but only any good if you can read the drives from the hardware it was set up in. In most cases you wouldn't be able to remove 1 drive from the system and attach it via a caddy to get the data off it.

 

As a professional photographer, I make a robocopy from live system to 1 disk, (only the changed files) , then robocopy from the backup drive to a second drive which is stored in a safe! I can literally then use a external dock or any system to pull of the data if required.

[Michael]

I've started to implement Azure Backup at bigger sites - secure off site backup, encrypted and very ease to use. You can also adopt any retention policy within your budget.

 

Per incremental backup, Geo-Redundant Storage makes 3 copies in location one and 3 copies in location two, hundreds of miles away.