I finally dumped FlexRAID a few months ago and have been experimenting with Stablebit DrivePool and SnapRAID in the meantime. It has been a slow evolution since I started with 3x2TB Seagates in 2011 and now I am at a crossroads.
I have always backed up my sensitive docs, photos and music to external HDDs but l left my DVD and BD Rips to the whims of my RAID 5/6 setup. Recently I began backing up my docs and photos to Google Drive via StableBit Cloud Drive and automated with SyncBack. I have backed up my music files to Amazon Music and Google Music.
That still leaves me with 19TB of movies. I was going to go with SnapRAID and 2 parity drives and continue to take my chances. However, I recently picked up 18TB of additional storage for about $350 (8TB WD Easystore and 2x5TB Seagate Backup Plus drives at Costco) and after doing the math, I realized that I could just as easily pair that with the 10TBs worth of drives I needed for parity and I could create a mirror on a separate PC. I could drop the idea of parity/RAID which would save wear and tear on the HDDs and there should be very little down time to rebuild an array in the event of failure.
So, now my primary server has a Stablebit DrivePool of 30TB (plus an additional 5TB Hot Swap) on 10 HDDs of differing sizes from 2TB to 5TB. My mirror has a Stablebit DrivePool of 22TB on 5 different drives from 2TB to 8TB. Syncback is about halfway through the 3 day process of copying everything over to the new pool.
I am just trying to figure out how to automate backup and recovery to be as simple as possible. I plan on running Syncback once a week from Server--->Mirror but my foresight has me wondering how I locate lost files if I lose a drive in the server since the drives in the pools are not 1:1. If Syncback is spreading the files out across the disks (and it appears to be doing this) then how do I know what to recover, short of just copying and pasting everything back to the main server? That would be a days long process and I would rather find a way of just identifying the missing files and replacing them from backup.
Is their software out there that can do incremental 1:1 mirrors and allows for simple, quicker identification and recovery of only the lost files? Maybe Syncback can do this... luckily I have never had to find out.
Statistics: Posted by smitbret — Wed Oct 18, 2017 11:59 pm
