Budget 0-20k Data backup (RAID Setup)

sanjeevram

sanjeevram

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I currently have a internal 1TB sata SSD (O.S), 512 GB SSD (Work files), 2tb WD black Hdd (Personal files) and a external 4tb HDD. I copy data from my internal drive's to the external drive once a month or so.
Also make a image backup of the OS SSD every couple of months on a 2.5" Internal laptop HDD, of late have also started taking data backup of my phone and and its getting a bit tedious and messy to copy data to and fro with too many duplications. I would want to buy two 4tb HDDs and put them in raid. Have shortlisted the following drives (Both of them are SMR).
Western Digital Blue 4TB 5400 RPM Desktop Hard Drive (WD40EZAZ)
Seagate Barracuda 4TB 5400 RPM Desktop Internal Hard Drive (ST4000DM004)
What would be the best possible way to streamline the setup. Cant go the NAS way as its out of budget
@vaibhavyagnik Would love your inputs.
 
If you dont want to build a dedicated system for backup and use your primary system itself and if you are using Windows on your main machine, the best option is Storage Spaces. It will create a RAID 1 (mirror) on your drive so that you can recover your data from one of the 4tb drive if the other fails.

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I understand that a lot of fatigue and frustration comes from having to manually run backups. I will try to address your concerns one by one.
1. Image backups - As you said you take image backups every couple of months. You can reduce this frequency if there are not a lot of changes in the OS. You can take a backup before a major windows update and one after update. These 2 image backups will serve you till next update event.
2. You can buy a software like Easus todo backup which does image backup, file backup and incremental backups and everything can be scheduled. So you don't have to worry about manually running any tasks. It costs only 60$ for lifetime licence. Use coupon code holdon for 10% discount.
3. If you do not want to pay, You can create bat files with simple copy commands. for example a bat file with the command "copy C:\Users\Sanjeevram\Documents\*.* E:\Backup /Y" will copy all files in your documents folder to a Backup folder and overwrite in case it is duplicate. This file can then be run periodically by task scheduler.

Now coming to number of backup copies. It is always advisable to have 3 copies of backup and one among them should be on the cloud. Keep only the absolute must have things on the cloud. If you want to have everything on the cloud, then obvioulsy, it is going to cost you money.

If buying hard disks, buy 1 from each WD and Seagate. You are reducing chances of a faulty batch of hard disks

I recommend that you buy 2 4TB hard disks, one internal and one external. connect 1 hard disk to computer and take backup on it. connect the other external hard disks to a raspberry pi and use it as a NAS. Take backups over the network.
aasimenator said:
If you dont want to build a dedicated system for backup and use your primary system itself and if you are using Windows on your main machine, the best option is Storage Spaces. It will create a RAID 1 (mirror) on your drive so that you can recover your data from one of the 4tb drive if the other fails.

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Does it require SATA configuration as RAID in BIOS or we can keep it in AHCI? I think AHCI because in this case the mirroring is being handled by windows am I correct?
 
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All great suggestions above. Just to add my two cents on the software -
For Disk Images, I found Macrium Reflect (free) to be pretty good and for Backup, the oddly named Bvckup (paid, around 30 USD and less during offers) or SyncFolders (free) as excellent options.
I follow a similar approach of Disk imaging and backup (1 internal and 1 external) just like Vaibhav mentioned, except instead of cloud, the final backup goes to my NAS on a periodic basis.
 
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vaibhavyagnik said:
Does it require SATA configuration as RAID in BIOS or we can keep it in AHCI? I think AHCI because in this case the mirroring is being handled by windows am I correct?
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We can use AHCI, as far as I know, it doesn't work with SATA, but it does work with RAID, configuration in the BIOS.
 
ibose said:
All great suggestions above. Just to add my two cents on the software -
For Disk Images, I found Macrium Reflect (free) to be pretty good and for Backup, the oddly named Bvckup (paid, around 30 USD and less during offers) or SyncFolders (free) as excellent options.
I follow a similar approach of Disk imaging and backup (1 internal and 1 external) just like Vaibhav mentioned, except instead of cloud, the final backup goes to my NAS on a periodic basis.
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Just install linux subsystem for windows and use commands like dd and rsync. These commands have been in the prod for ever and all the paid apps are usually forked off of these.
Ps: dd for image backup and rsync for file. https://restic.net/ is a good alternative for a more powerful rsync that we used in my last company.
 
booo said:
Just install linux subsystem for windows and use commands like dd and rsync.
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Yes I am aware of these and used them many eons ago. Guess I am too old and lazy for them now. For power users and admins, they are pretty powerful tools. But they may not be everybody's cup of tea.
 
My 2 paisa: Use drives with good reliability. Opt for Ironwolf, WD Red or the Toshiba N300. Ironwolf comes with a complementary data recovery service.
 
5554ajith said:
My 2 paisa: Use drives with good reliability. Opt for Ironwolf, WD Red or the Toshiba N300. Ironwolf comes with a complementary data recovery service.
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I believe that is Ironwolf Pro. The Ironwolf ones are also quite reliable but does not have the complementary data recovery service. Both these families are non-SMR drives and have 3-5 years of warranty. 4TB models are pretty competitively priced even in India. Would recommend skipping the Reds as they now use SMR drives for the WD Red series.

@sanjeevram Regarding the original question, having 3 copies of data is helpful. However, if you have different sized drives and limited cloud space, you can split the backups across multiple smaller drives. Something like FreeFileSync (mentioned by @dafreaking above) is good for this task. The way I have my backup set is as below:

1. User profile folders (desktop, documents, etc.) on OneDrive.
2. Important documents, etc. synced to multiple Google drive accounts
3. Large files: Primary copy on a 4TB Ironwolf, backup #1 (3TB + 500GB internal drives), backup #2 on a 4TB WD Passport external drive (connected once every week for sync). All these are synced via FreefileSync jobs.

This even saved me from a situation where both my primary and external drive failed simultaneously once.
 
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