[jader201]

Today I received a Synology DS1511+. I've been eying this for close to a year, considering the purchase to serve as a primary backup to my personal files. This includes work-related files as well as personal media (audio, video, and images). It will also serve as a centralized location for other media such as music and recorded videos.


Regarding my personal media, we have and do a lot of home movie recording, and I have moved a lot of old VHS tapes to digital files, as well as our HD camcorder that records digital. These, in addition to all of our home pictures, are adding up very quickly.


My question is, what is a good backup plan for backing up large volumes of media files? Surely in this age of HD video, people are running into problems of how to keep their videos backed up.


A manual offsite solution -- transporting physical media back and forth to an offsite location -- seems very impractical. Every day, we could have several gigs of new files that will need to be backed up.


My thought was to use the DS1511+ to keep all of our files backed up. The goal was for this NAS to serve as the only location in which these files are stored, raided for redundancy and failover. Of course, I'm assuming the risk of theft and fire, until technology catches up with my needs without having to worry about offsite backups.


For those of you that are continually adding to your library of personal media, how are you dealing with backups?


Thanks in advance.

 

[MarkHotchkiss]

Hi Jader,


Do not depend on the redundancy of your NAS's raid as a backup. I have had a power-supply fail in a NAS, and it destroyed every drive in the NAS.


I have ALL files on the NAS. My work and play files, as well as my wife and dog's work and play files, all live on the NAS. The different computers only hold the operating software and programs. That way, they don't need to be backed-up very often.


The NAS is backed-up two ways:


First, a large USB drive is permanently plugged in to the NAS, and the Synology does an incremental backup to it each night. That way, if the NAS spontaneously explodes, I still have all of my data from the day before. It also helps if my wife or dog accidentally delete something.


Second, I have two large USB drives for offsite backup. One will be plugged in to the Synology, and will accumulate backup data during the week. Once a week, when I go to the bank, I swap that drive with the other one in a safety-deposit box. If the neighborhood spontaneously explodes, I still have all of my data from the week before.

 

[jader201]

Thanks Mark.


In my case, though, I may have 10TB worth of data that needs to be backed up. Single hard drive backups won't cut it for me, and again, I really don't want to deal with purchasing/managing multiple HD backups (i.e. 3-4 3TB drives) in the method you described.


Something that I discovered since posting this is CrashPlan . To me, this makes much more sense. Of course, it will take a while to back up everything on the first run, but after that, it shouldn't take more than 24 hours for each incremental backup (i.e. whenever I dump 30+ GB of videos on it).


Problem is, this seems to be a bit of a pain to set up with the DS1511+.

 

[MarkHotchkiss]

Although CrashPlan may be a good solution for you, it would not work for me. The reasons are:

My business files are proprietary. My insurance company will not cover me for theft or loss if I use an internet backup plan.

My Internet upload speed is too slow. If both my wife and I are busy, we can generate data faster than it can flow over the internet. It could take over a week to backup one busy day. One 6gig DVD would take over four days.

Though it doesn't apply to me, if you have a cap on your internet bandwidth, you could easily exceed it.
Have you looked at tape backup?