Back up of high res video files

3 hours ago, ChrisRoss said:

BTW RAID is not a backup solutions - it's only a means to get the system back online quickly

As someone whose day job involves deploying, administering and fixing medium-large enterprise RAID arrays, I second this. RAID is a data availability solution, not a data preservation solution. RAID guards a very specific failure mode - unrecoverable read failure, whether at a block/sector level, or at a drive level - while introducing multiple additional failure points. It does nothing to guard against user error (deletion, undesired changes), malicious actors (ransomware), or site-level disasters (fire, flooding, burglary). Properly safeguarding the data requires at least one additional full copy that is stored on independent, geographically-separated hardware, along with a reasonable number of historical restore points.

If you have the upload speeds to support it, a cloud provider will do a far better job of safeguarding your data than you can on your own without expending an amount of effort (and money) which, for most home users, stretches the definition of 'reasonable'. I use BackBlaze and I'm quite happy with them.

3 hours ago, Barmaglot said:

If you have the upload speeds to support it, a cloud provider will do a far better job of safeguarding your data than you can on your own without expending an amount of effort (and money) which, for most home users, stretches the definition of 'reasonable'. I use BackBlaze and I'm quite happy with them.

Wow, few years ago (before I bought tons of hdd) was impossible to find a cloud provider with unlimited space and an affordable price for personal use.

I have about 10 TB of video files and they grow quicky. What's your feedback?

1 hour ago, Davide DB said:

Wow, few years ago (before I bought tons of hdd) was impossible to find a cloud provider with unlimited space and an affordable price for personal use.

I have about 10 TB of video files and they grow quicky. What's your feedback?

I moved to BackBlaze five years ago, when Crashplan retired their personal backup offering. Overall, it's been solid - the backup client sits in the background and does its job, only popping up when I've been offline for a few days (like, say, on a liveaboard). I'm currently backing up just shy of 1TB. I've done a few restores over the years, mostly when I overwrote important data by mistake, and those went without a hitch, but I've been told that their restore process is rather slow on large data sets. They have a 'restore by mail' option where they ship you a hard drive, but I haven't had the need to use it thus far. The company behind it has a very good reputation in IT community.

I need to read the terms and conditions well. It all sounds too good. I wouldn't want there to be limits on the size of daily or monthly uploads. With video files it is easy to get to record 10/20 GB in a dive.

Thanks!

I just restored a ~4GB software image - took a couple minutes to set up and then about ten minutes to download, on a DSL connection from Thailand.

On 3/21/2023 at 3:54 AM, ChrisRoss said:

BTW RAID is not a backup solutions - it's only a means to get the system back online quickly and you do have to be very careful with RAID systems - if it's a straight mirror system that's just two copies effectively made at once, so if one fails you can use the other copy anywhere.  If it's Raid 5 and for example your RAID motherboard fails you can't access the drives due to the encoding used.   Same thing is a NAS box with RAID built in fails, you may find yourself needing to source an identical box to install your discs in to read it. 

The other thing to consider is that your two copies on a mirrored RAID can be taken out by a single failure such as a power surge taking out your NAS box or however you have the RAID setup. 

Personally with the availability of 12TB drives these days I would favour single large drives in good quality individual cases with a fast interface, then you only hook one of them at a time onto your system.  Or you could for example have a 12 TB drive in your system box and a second external for two copies.

A single non encoded HDD that can be plugged into nay machine anywhere and read is your ultimate backup.

Makes a lot of sense. Thanks Chris. NOW to start looking for a good HDD 

On 3/21/2023 at 12:44 PM, Davide DB said:

I need to read the terms and conditions well. It all sounds too good. I wouldn't want there to be limits on the size of daily or monthly uploads. With video files it is easy to get to record 10/20 GB in a dive.

Sorry about bumping an older thread, but I recently suffered a drive crash in my laptop - 2TB Intel 660p just went 'poof' all of a sudden; all data just disappeared. Fortunately there were a few months left on the warranty, so I got it RMAed. As luck would have it, I was traveling, and didn't have access to a proper high-speed connection to download all the data (about 1TB), so I only grabbed the critical stuff that I needed to work. Came back home a couple days ago and restored the whole archive within a day. The only size limitation on online restores is a maximum 500GB per restore - you select a folder tree that you want to download, their system compresses it into a ZIP archive, you download this zip (either with a browser, or their own download tool) and then extract it to get your data; this sum total of files to be placed in a single zip cannot exceed 500GB, so I had to split my restore into three sessions.