I’m looking for a solution to safely store some of my work files (spreadsheets, books, etc) on an external drive as a backup. I need the drive to be fail proof, so I think I need RAID type storage, but I’m not seeing a lot of options out there. Online, I found only a products made by “Glyph” and “LaCie”
Why are there no options for more External RAID SSD? is RAID outdated now? if it is, what should I be looking for? Ideally I would like to find something portable that would fit into a work bag.
Is it supposed to be a cold backup? Buy two drives and copy identical files to them. If for some reason one drive stops working, you have the other at your disposal all the time.
For added randomness, buy two different drive models from two different manufacturers.
Store these drives as far apart physically as possible to create as much separation as possible from negative phenomena that may affect per drive location.
If you have a live backup, two Odroid HC4 and two disks in raid1 each. Then you have both raid1 per device and double separation between pairs of drives.
Generally in terms of data storage, encryption, if the disk has enough space, do two sets of data per disk. Perform data checksums and store several copies of them in different places so that their integrity can be determined in case of need for recovery (Bit Rot).
I don’t know if it makes sense to look for a dedicated box. Just good drives and a solid external enclosure if it’s going to be a cold backup.
Three copies, across at least two devices. One of them is off-site.
There’s really no such thing as a “fail proof” drive. Trusting important data to any single drive is generally a bad idea, but you probably already know that which is why you were looking for RAIDish things.
I would say so, but for different reasons. The thing that would stop me from using some kind of RAID1-in-a-box device is it might have some kind of semi-custom control board which does the RAIDy bits making them difficult or impossible to access any other way. You don’t want to get stuck in a situation where your backups are inaccessible because that tiny PCB in there died or something like that.
And remember to periodically test your backups! It sucks a lot more to find out your backups aren’t usable at the point where you really need them.
Any backup must be tested, else it could just be junk OP is saving again and again.
How about the grandfather system…
buy 3 external SSD’s/HDD’s.
Drive 1 in the bag. Get to work, swap drive1 for drive 2 at work, and start the update.
End of shift, take drive2 home, and when get home, swap drive 2 for drive 3 which is in the house.
Next morning you have drive 3, which is 2 workdays old which you take in, and swap for drive 1, which has yesterdays files. Start backing up to drive 3, and at end of day, take drive 1 with you, and you will have yesterdays files with you, the day before a at home, and the day before that is being /been updated to today’s files?
If that kind of makes sense?
Maybe better to take fresh backup with you, and leave an older backup in office, but I thin the idea goes through?
But no backup counts unless you can test it. Meaningfully (as in, files Actually open )
After disabling hibernation and messing with some power options to keep it from being shut off during sleep, it’s been working solid for over a month on my laptop. So far power loss (pulling the plug) seems to be handled gracefully.
My SSDs do have PLP. Not sure how something like some 860 evos would handle power loss.
I haven’t tested moving it back and forth to different systems yet. I expect what will happen is something gets confused and I’ll need to reboot 2-3 times.
I have not yet iterated through seeing how it handles losing a disk. Naturally I also have daily backups setup on it especially since I’m actively using it as a desktop right now.
I had initially considered dual M.2 sata, but those things were really pricey for decent sizes when last I looked, and it made more sense to go with traditional 2.5" sata.
This also has a JBOD mode which is actually what I want for the future. It’s so when I feel the need for self harm I can experiment with setting up either ZFS or BTRFS storage on windows, so I can have real data corruption protection, not just outright hardware failure protection.
I know I’m flying in the face of several people here, but RAID is not dead. I use it both in devices I own and at work. It adds another layer of protection for your data. When used intelligently, RAID allows you to gracefully recover from a failed drive (or more) with no loss of data and lets you get on with your day a lot faster.
RAID is not a backup, as stated. It is a part of a layered approach to data protection and more importantly, data integrity. 3-2-1 is a good starting point, but in my business we have multiple datacenters in multiple countries replicating and backing up info on different schedules. All of it on RAID storage with it’s own independent snapshot backup system replicated offsite. We have two Cloud backup locations for files (different providers) with a third for immutable backups. If an office goes dark, we can go through another office or the DR site for the needed info with no delay. The business keeps on trucking with most end users not even realizing they are going to another country. If a Cloud provider goes dark (it happens. Read up on OVHcloud / WebNX), we still have access to backups. If needed, we can (and have) go back years for Exchange or file info for things like legal cases. The longest recovery I have done personally is nine+ years.
One offsite backup is not enough for us, because that would be a single point of failure. YMMV, but RAID is still a viable tool and will be for many years to come IMO.
Taking a pair of 7,000 MB/s NVMe drives, putting them into a 2.5" SSD case, then throttling them to SATA speeds would not be a responsible spend of money in my mind.
It’s rather obvious that everything here is a bottleneck, but the goal is not performance for the OP.
Yes, it’s cool and better, but the OP probably wants to have it in a portable form or at least in a ready-made box.
Of course it isn’t. We use it everywhere at work.
It’s just a good idea to always remember that raid is not a home user backup per se.
If someone wants to have a raid, it’s ok, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it would be good to never do it at the expense of having a backup.
OP, if I understand correctly, he wants to have a highly reliable medium for data in a mobile form in the format of one compact box, and for this he is probably thinking about raid1.
Only if there is any sense in such a solution … Yes, you can buy a ready-made solution, which I showed earlier, but will it actually provide what the OP wants.
The worst thing about these ready-made solutions may be some proprietary closed way of doing this raid1. And in the event of a box failure, there may be a problem with recovery on the PC … it may be, but of course it does not have to be, a matter of checking.
If the OP really wants to go in that direction then buy one or two of these boxes and make regular backups in case the box goes down or anything happens.
I doubt the OP wants a 27/7 online solution or some kind of mobile NAS. Rather, an ordinary handy and mobile means of carrying data with you.
Even if the OP has raid1 and even if it protects him from a single disk failure, the number of threats to data is still high and raid1 won’t help. But that’s a bit of a longer discussion.
This looks interesting. two 2.5 ssd, raid1, usb3, the price is rather acceptable, the size is a bit large but still within the limits of mobility…
Or what @Log proposed… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CQ6C4MW
Of course, you can create something similar yourself. Some sbc and drives and create an enclosure.
RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is a technology that combines multiple physical disk drives into a single logical storage unit, providing improved data reliability and performance. RAID is not outdated, and it is still commonly used in various storage solutions, including external hard drives.
There are several reasons why you might not be finding a wide variety of external RAID SSDs (Solid State Drives) on the market:
Cost: SSDs are generally more expensive than traditional hard drives, and using multiple SSDs in a RAID configuration can further increase the cost.
Capacity: External hard drives with larger capacity tend to be more popular, and it can be more cost-effective to use multiple hard drives in a RAID configuration to achieve higher capacity, rather than using a single large SSD.
Performance: While SSDs offer faster performance than hard drives, the performance benefits of RAID may not be as significant when using SSDs due to their already high performance.
If you are looking for a portable, fail-proof solution for storing your work files, you may want to consider using a cloud storage service, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or Microsoft OneDrive. These services offer secure, off-site storage and automatic backup of your files, and you can access your files from any device with an internet connection.
Alternatively, you could consider using a portable hard drive with a RAID configuration, such as the Glyph or LaCie products you mentioned. These drives offer the added protection of RAID, and can be easily carried with you in a work bag.
Thanks I saw that video but the technical stuff was over my head. The reason why I asked if RAID is outdated is because of that video.
Reading through the replies here, it sounds like the best solution is multiple regular SSD’s. It will be tedious to keep all of the files changes updated between them.
Backups should be automated with something like restic or maybe syncthing. Syncthing isn’t really a backup client, but it’ll do the job of automating replication of files to different places/devices.
It’s worth the trouble to be sure all your data is being backed up automatically every day, or whatever your schedule ends up being.
For something quick and dirty I’ve just used a simple cron job before that rsync’s my home directory between machines. That works also.
Is there a RAID1 approach where one isn’t dependent on the hardware that connects the drives? That is, in the event of controller or enclosure failure, one can take out one drive and put it in another computer or different enclosure and access the data, ideally with no or minimal software to be installed?
Closest thing to that is probably a box from Synology. They have two drive models if all you’re going to use it for is a backup target. If you can swing it budget-wise I’d say the ones that can take 4 or 6 drives are probably sweet spot since you can do more with them than just backups.
You can quite actively automate this with the right software or a couple of scripts. But if you want something totally automatic, there’s a dock with full disk cloning.
You go to town with disk A, disk changes happen, you come home, you put disk A in the dock and you put disk B in, press “copy” and the contents of disk A are copied to disk B (erasing everything), end result you have two disks with the same content.
The same can be achieved simply by using two drives attached to the PC and one of the many backup programs.
The option with cloning the entire disk has the disadvantage that every time everything is copied, not just the differences. Many data synchronization/backup software can and will do for you to properly synchronize data between drives.
Cloning entire drives is vulnerable to catastrophic loss of data. There are many scenarios where problems are aged through the cycle. For example, ransomware that waits a while. One really needs an incremental method that can get data back from times in the past. I’ve needed to do that a few times.
