Is physical disc backup still advised?

May be overkill, but I keep very important docs (smaller files) on a BR M disc’s in my fire safe. The rest I do incremental BU to cold storage disks. Thats of course beyond the cloud bu, and local set. I care about my data lol.

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I’m not sure if this is applicable to you, considering you trying to back up images, which don’t take up a lot of space. Also, this isn’t as convenient for new data.

However, If you have the money, do look at buying a tape drive. If you’re willing to get used (if it works, it works) I spotted one for 400 bucks on Ebay, once. Otherwise it’ll cost around 1000 to 2000 bucks for a decent tape drive. Once you get one, the actual tapes are extremely cheap with 100 TB worth of good quality tapes costing only around 700 bucks. Also, unlike HDDs, LTO tape has a much longer lifetime of around 30 years, unlike a HDDs 7-10. Also an HDD can also just randomly fail due to stuff like a 1 feet drop.

My two cents, although I haven’t used it yet (I’m too young to own more than 10 TB of files): buy a tape drive, make around 3 backups of all your important data, and send it to your family members. There is a 0% chance you’re losing your data if you use this method.

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It is impossible to think about data management in a sense of only size or only storage method. Blueray disc might still die and you still need to make sure it was written correctly.

It is always a function of at least the following variables and you can ignore them at your own peril :slight_smile:

  1. Frequency of changes (Workflow options)
  2. Age of the project (Workflow options)
  3. Size of a snapshot (Storage options)
  4. Work and time related to making a snapshot (Storage options, Automation options, Human error)
  5. Work and time related to maintenance (Storage options, Automation options, Human error)
  6. Expectations of use (Infrastructure options, Workflow options)
  7. Impact to performance (Infrastructure options, Workflow options)

For example - you cannot change workflow to make automation easier - that just makes your entire system less stable.

And as always sometimes it is better to either split backup solutions or add dedicated machines.
This is why NAS is such a huge benefit for most people. Having both staging images and data partitions easy to backup independently of the workflow.

Yes it is true that Just like RAID - NAS is not a backup.

A network attached NAS can be a backup. [not necessarily a *Good one, and better as part of a strategy] But if it is also used to serve files, then the files would need backing up elsewhere.

For example, desktop stored to NAS, NAS stored to Cloud, then you have 2 copies of Nas data, and 3 copies of desktop; if the files on the NAS are just media files, less backup might be needed?

Don’t have to use The Cloud, could use a string of recursive NAS’s…

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I settled with doing this:

Windows for syncing with all the different services I use

Sync that to a unRaid NAS once in a while (at least 1 per month)

Sync it to USB drives (i bought a few of them for offsite storage) once in a while (at least once a month, but not at the same time as NAS sync)

Alltime backup to cloud from the Windows machine, but without deleting old copies, so can always restore something I delete by accident

So NAS is only on when needed, and the Windows is on a few times per week.

At a worst case scenario I would max loose something like 3 days, which is not really critcal. Its more the long run Im concerned about and that got fixed this way :+1:

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