What's the cheapest way to make a drive array purely for backups?
I recently had a drive fail on me, with media that is mostly replaceable but incredibly annoying and time consuming to replace. It got me thinking I should have a backup system in place so in the future I don't get burned like this. I have a bunch of old…
I recently had a drive fail on me, with media that is mostly replaceable but incredibly annoying and time consuming to replace. It got me thinking I should have a backup system in place so in the future I don't get burned like this. I have a bunch of old internal disk drives (5x2.5" and 1x3.5") lying about from scrapped laptops and such each ranging between 100-250GB. I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions on the cheapest way to wire these up as a backup? I've looked into multi-tray drive bays but they don't run that cheap, and at a certain price point I figure it would just make more sense to buy a single consolidated disk dedicated to backups. (I know failure modes are different for 1 drive vs many but the crux here is I don't want to spend that much money)
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Thanks! Yeah that's a very fair point, plugging each drive in manually might be an alright first stab at it as my data shouldn't be changing much on a daily basis.
Yeah I think this approach would be a little too risky for my taste haha. Better to split into chunks with some of sort of script I think.
Thanks for the suggestion! This was one of the options I was looking at, but to get all the drives connected simultaneously I'd need to purchase the hardware to do so which was part of my dilemma in the first place. Weighing if I'm already going to spend do I just get a bigger drive. Could always keep an extra copy on these old ones which I hand bomb once in a while
You make some excellent points. The drive that burned me was actually a fairly beefy IronWolf, luckily within warranty. I also should've clarified in my post, I want this as a second copy not as my primary backup. For stuff I really can't afford to lose, I think you're right in that a Cloud copy is likely a smart addition.
It's an LLM.
You may not want to hear this option. If you don't want to spend any money then just create backup scripts. plugin drive run script mount drive use rsync unmount drive repeat It will be time consuming because you need to write scripts for each drive where you rsync a folder/ files from your main NAS/ server to the backup drive. It will go faster if you have multiple ways to connect more disks to your computer that doing the backup. You can mount based on UDID Of course this is not automatic but it really depends how important your data is and how often it is changing. Since you are doing this for convenience then you can do this at a lower rate. Like once a month or something. There probably better ways to do this but honestly you can keep it simple if you don't want to invest alot money. Other than that, you have the other two methods that will be more convenient but will cost more money. For all important files you should follow 3-2-1 backup rule. It will be costly but if it's important then you need to invest. Hope that helps
This is exactly what I was about to suggest: mergefs + snapraid. For less volatile environments this is great
tar -M writing to the raw block device, tar -M /dev/sda, when it finishes, unplug, plug next one. Make sure to label them. Very unreliable because one disk goes off and that information is kaput. But there is something beatiful about using technology from the age of the floppy.
for mismatched drives like that mergerfs pools them all into one mount so a single rsync target spans every disk, no matching sizes needed the way raid wants. throw snapraid on top if you want a bit of parity without buying anything imo
if you want to learn about RAID stuff - then go for it if you want something that is worthwhile, then don't. because you'll just end up with a mess of multiple points of failure on old drives that probably already have bad sectors
honest take: don't build your only backup out of the same dying laptop pulls that just burned you, those 100-250gb drives are more likely to fail than whatever they're protecting. mergerfs + snapraid over the mismatched disks is the right cheap answer if you want to reuse them, but treat that pool as one copy, not the backup itself. the cheapest actually-safe setup is one bigger used drive plus an offsite or cloud copy of the stuff you truly can't replace, since a single-location array dies with the house.
I've been praying to Satan, nothing yet