I have been away for a while...again. sorry.
We all know we should make backups...but 95% of us are to lazy to actually do it. Or...just lack the knowledge to do it correctly. I have been digging into it lately and starting to look at how to make good offsite backups of my NAS. I have 32TB in there of which 22 is usable....but only about 4-5TB is "backup worthy". Probably less if I go through it and delete really old stuff! I have setup regular automatic "backups" of certain directories which are more like snapshots and they go back about 6 months.
But all this really protects against is accidental file deletion! If the harddrive's go bad the NAS can handle 1 failure of the 4 x 8TB drives in there. The drives are reaching the 4 year mark and have been spinning mostly 24/7 since I bought them. And between 3-5 years is the time you should expect to see degradation. or at least prepare to replace the drives. Until recently I did have monthly scrubbing enabled, but since it takes a while and is noisy I changed it to 3 months which i find good enough.
I have been researching best practices in backups and discovered the 3-2-1 method. It basically means that you should have 3 copies of your data, then 2 backup copies on 2 different media (disk and tape), and one of those should be in another location. I have been looking at cloud options, but so far I found them both restrictive and expensive! I hate optical media...but...beside that the capacity is just far too low! CD and DVD are not even a consideration. But if we take my 4TB of data...I would need at least 40 100GB bluerays!!!!!!
In the past I did have Iomega REV drive of 35GB and two years ago I got a 120GB one from ebay. These are basically removable harddisc modules. back in the day, around 2006, 35GB was a lot of data. To be honest...I never really kept the backup process going though.
I did have a NAS back then too and over the past 15-20 years I did get into the habit off storing most of my data ON the NAS. But....during my 3-2-1 research I also learned "A NAS is NOT a backup"!!! It can be a backup target! For example if you make a backup of your laptop and store that on the NAS...congratulations! You have made you're second copy!
The most straight forward way I see a lot of people make "backups" is on external harddisks or SSD! I have some news for you...they don't live forever...even when stored in optimal conditions! HDD can fail mechanically...but also the magnetic fields on the discs might degrade in roughly 5-10 years. SSD's can fail as soon as just 3-5 years!!!! I had no idea too! This was a shock to me! The good news is that it does not necessarily mean that hardware fails itself...just that it looses it's data and can't recover! The way to mitigate this decay is by regulatory scrubbing the data! meaning...rewrite every singly sector of your HDD or SSD. my synology NAS can schedule this. You can do it manually by copying all your data from one SSD to another freshly formatted and trimmed one! Then the counter starts again...so maybe if SSD's or HDD's are your backups...do this every 2 years.
But what shocked me even more is that NAND flash storage has the same issues! They would last a bit longer if they are high enough quality...but 20-30 years is about it! What this could mean for our game consoles is that when they reach the 30 years old mark...the bios/firmware inside could be corrupted!! I think the PSP, DS and Wii are the first to really be the first victims of corrupted NAND storage! On the wii especially the boot rom could be vulnerable! and when it happens...the device won't boot anymore!!!
In theory...reflashing the firmware restores the NAND cell charge. Rewriting NAND storage entirely also does the same thing.
To be honest....most of this info I got from ChatGPT. But i did do some searches and it does seem to hold some truth! And that scared me a bit
At least for my NAS backups I have opted to get an LTO-5 tape drive! It's not cheap to start with it....a brand new one would cost like 6000 euro! I paid like 10% of that for a used drive that is a couple years old already! But you also need a SAS interface card and cables, which for me totaled about 250 euro! LTO-5 tapes have a 1.5TB capacity and cost about 24-30 euro's a piece. meaning I can store my 4TB of "important" data on just 3 tapes for about 75 euro! Then I can get a couple more and make another full 4TB backup in a month or two! After that...I could either buy another set or reuse the set from the first backup round!
Speed is acceptable at 140MB/s read/write speed. Writing a full tape should take about 2,5 hours. To do it right...I should actually make two set's of tapes of the same backups. and store one set in another location! that's how the 3-2-1 rule explains it.
My main OS is linux so I have no big driver issues. the drive is recognized fine and using the LTFS format on the tape it's basically just a removable 1.5TB volume you can simply copy files to just like any other removable drive. I did have to compile myself...but it was not that hard. One thing LTFS tapes do not like is small files. It's best to package your backups into large archives. I have chosen 7z in 50GB parts with no compression because the synology backups are already compressed.
i only just got the drive but the initial testing looks good!
TLDR; make backups of your data! Storage devices don't live forever!
