I've come to the point in my data acquisition journey where it's time to be serious about full backups. I have an 8-bay - 8x16TB (7D+1P) on Unraid (xfs).
I have a full set of drives already to act as the backup (again 8x16tb). The backups will be kept offsite, effectively cold storage, and I'll look to bring them home and run the backup process about every 2 months. For my personal data this will be a 4th copy, and my Media this will be the 2nd copy.
I have a Windows 11 machine with CS-382 case to allow for moving the backup hotswaps quickly, but I am figuring out how to establish the right process between windows and unraid to make it all work.... I'm reading through how to use rclone effectively so I suspect that will be the tool to operate the backups.
My 3 primary areas of risk are:
- My dumbass makes a mistakes and deletes stuff
- Drive failure
- Weather (flood/fire) or other catastrophic loss event
My questions are:
- For backups does one just move the data from the primary to the backup independent of it's source drive or do you want to focus on mirroring drive to drive?
- The latter makes more sense as if I concurrent drive failure (i.e. 2 drive failure with only 1 Parity) then i know exactly what I've lost.
- Do you encrypt your backup drives (if you don't encrypt your primaries)? Thinking through what happens if someone takes my backup drives from the offsite location - what could they do with it? Minor concern all things considered.
- How do you test your backups?
- Any other tips you might have for someone starting out and needing to do an initial backup of 50tb?
Thanks!