I’ve been “staging” data onto a 12tb external drive for a few months in preparation for building a more robust system. In the back of my mind I knew that if I didn’t have a backup of this and something happened all is lost and I was truly an idiot.

Now that I’ve got the idiocy out of the way, my roommate plugged in the drive as she decided it would be a nice idea to clean up my desk and such. She called me saying she smelled burning plastic and shutdown my systems.

I came home to find the external drive smelling of burnt plastic and my heart sank. It would not power on, I pulled it out of the encloure and connected it to a usb sata cable and power source and it would not come on. So essentially I lost everything.

This is my fault for not having backups and allowing other people to touch my gear. So I’ve learned my lesson.

I’m working to recover everything that I actually cared about (maybe 2-3tb out of the full disk I cared about).

Moving forward. I don’t know that spending 2k on a NAS is going to do me any good as the NAS is not a replacement for backups.

I’m trying to come up with a new system (to me) for backups/archiving.

Here’s what I used to have.

1 x external usb drive encrypted with Luks, data within is client-side encrypted with restic for multiple sources. This works fine for me and I’ve got my restic and luks head keys backed up (like that, huh? lol).

I’m likely going to go with this same method, but I’m thinking this time I’ll figure out a way to have a second drive of the same size that either is a restic target so all backups and archives are duplicated as they are archived or figure out a way to do this to where drive A is somehow mirrored to drive B when it’s not archiving. I’m not sure if this is possible or the best way to do this.

If you were starting over and had the budget for say 2-3 big external drives what would you recommend?

I know I am also going to be using something like B2 with encryption as a point of last resort backup solution (encrypted client side again). But for now I’m focusing on physical media.

Thanks for your help. I expect to be flamed for this post, but trust me I’ve learned my lesson and was idiot-taxes

  • @Solo-MexBEnglish
    1•8 months ago

    I don’t know that spending 2k on a NAS is going to do me any good as the NAS is not a replacement for backups.

    This is very true but a NAS still has its place. Using RAID-1 (simple mirroring) protects against any potential catastrophic failure of hardware but does nothing to protect you from a ransomware attack or stupidly deleting the wrong folders. So there is a point to having a NAS but it’s not 100% solution on its own.

    Relying on cloud storage for backup has its own set of problems. Cost of service, extra charges for retrieving your data when needed, and the extreme time it takes to transfer anything. Depending on the volume of data, it could take weeks to download everything back to your location. Add to that the loss of privacy and the potential for any given provider to go out of business or change their business model with total disregard for their customers and it’s not really the best backup solution.

    IMHO the way around these limitations is to have a NAS with RAID-1 (for problem set #1) and set up a second NAS either on site or remote and send periodic backups to it using whatever intervals make sense for your case. I do this with my Synology NAS as my primary and an older Terramaster NAS that receives the backups via Rsync. I have total control over what gets backed up and when, and in the event of a total loss of the primary NAS the other one is still available to rebuild from.