Organising MY Hard Drives

[androidman]

Hi,

I run a Windows 7 PC. I have accumulated 3 hard drives that I use to back up my PC. My hard disk (capacity 500gb) on the PC is getting full and my back up drives are nearly full, too, so backing up is going to be impossible, soon.

I would like to achieve a couple of things:

1. Move a lot of the content of my PC's hard disk on to a separate external hard drive. There's a lot of stuff I rarely look at and it can all go on to a separate hard disk. This would free up space on my PC's internal hard disk which may help generally.

2. Have an external back up drive that is large enough to back up everything that I remove from my PC to the separate hard drive as in 1. above as well as backing up everything from my PC. Everything gets backed up that way.

I was going to go and buy one of those incredibly large external hard drives (about 3TB) to do this but I notice that there are also some other solutions now (diskstation? network storage?) which I know nothing about. I'd welcome ideas about how I can achieve my objectives above together with any thoughts about what I need to keep in mind about the various options. We have BTbroadband box if that makes any difference.

Many thanks,

John

 

[mishra]

Your PC.
SSD (120-240GB): for O/S, applications (spotify, photoshop, office, etc) and currently playable games
HDD (1-2TB): for other games, web downloads

Option A (for minimal tech knowledge)
Get yourself a NAS like Qnap or Synology. Load that with 2x 3TB drives in RAID 1 and store all your other data (music, movies, documents, photos).

Option B (for some tech knowledge)
Get yourself micro-server like HP Gen 8 (can be had for ~£100-140 after cashback). Load that with 2x 3TB drives in RAID 1 and store there all your other data (music, movies, documents, photos).
With this option you would ideally install linux as O/S and use MDADM for raid (can go with built in raid - but MDADM option much better imo).
Then setup Samba shares to share your data over your home network to your PC and other laptops.
Finally install Plex so you can stream any movies, photos, music to your mobile phones through app, Smart TVs natively, if you have no smart TV just get a Chromecast and stream directly through it - you can even install Plex client on your Raspberry Pi.

Now, for backups either use cloud storage.. or simply connect additional USB drive and make sure you backup your data like that. You simply cannot go wrong with this setup.

Size of drives it's up to you. I know it's a bit of investment upfront, but if you care about data this is the only way to go.

Now regarding using 3 separate 3x1TB drives.. I personally think it's madness not only you end up with data all over the place, but how do you sync that data across. Do you run different sync profiles or do you do it manually. It just feels not as refined as it should be. Better RAID 1 two of these drives and use 3rd one for backups?

Cloud storage is not as expensive as people think. Crashplan have amazing pricing structure, with retention and option to encrypt all of your data.I would not store there my main data but to store my backups there, well why not?

I know I have mentioned like half a dozen of terms there and it may be a bit overwhelming at first... but it really is not as complicated as it seems. There are great many guides online for setting any of the above + there is this forum too ^^

To cut the long story short you really want a NAS (with at least 2 drives) to do it properly.

 

[mishra]

Yup, that's the idea. So it gives you time to get a new drive in order to replace the broken one. (while you still have access to all your data)

 

[Warbloke]

This one is pretty decent:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Synology-Di...TF8&qid=1442568174&sr=8-3&keywords=raid+1+nas

http://www.trustedreviews.com/synology-ds215j-review

You would go for the 6TB option, and as Mishra explained, you would choose during the setup RAID1 (mirroring)
This literally halves the storage so you only get 3TB of space (as everything is written to both drives)
If one fails, all the data is there on the other and is still accessable while you buy a new drive... just later pop in a replacement drive, and the thing automatically copys/ syncs everything again onto the new one.

Don't choose RAID 0 for backups. This gives you more of the 6TB space, and better IO performance, but if 1 disk fails, you lose everything.
(well.. you can use software to rebuild the Array or indeed recover some data, but it can be hit or miss)

 

[LFFPicard]

Raid is overrated for personal storage.
I don't have any redundant backup, not had for 5years, will be a shame if all this goes bang.....



^^ Although, you could

But if you want automated backup, the best option is to go for Synology, best UI for a NAS you can get, best name in the NAS industry as well. Try this one for size, http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00FWURI8K Reasonable price, don't worry about the Red drives get Green or Black drives as they are cheaper. Synology manager can setup auto backup for you etc so by far the best option.

 

[androidman]

Phewee! Thanks for your fantastic response, everyone. I'm truly grateful

There's a lot there for me to take on board so I'll give it some thought and carry out some research over the next few days. There are quite a few things mentioned above that I have no knowledge about but I think that I get the general ideas, some of which are most useful.

Not sure I have £350 for the ultimate solution shown above but I can see the attraction of two separate drives, one to hold everything and one to back it up, preferably automatically.

I'm off to do some research about it all ...... any other thoughts would be most appreciated.

John

 

[LFFPicard]

Well as I say I only have single backups, and all those drives in my post other than C and D are all USB external drives.
I picked up a couple Seagate 5TB drives on a daily deal at ebuyer a few months back for £120 each. Bargain!

Depending on what you need just keep an eye out on the daily deals at places like Dabs and Ebuyer, when an external drives comes up cheap that is the size your after and Western Digital, Seagate or another top brand then just grab one of those.

 

[androidman]

Thank you everyone for your kind assistance in helping me to get to grips with my backup arrangements. You completely changed the way that I was thinking about organising things. I have now managed to get sorted. I really couldn't afford the NAS option so I went for two large external hard drives. Amazon Warehouse proved to be a great place to source my requirements.

I would very much like to be able to backup my PC automatically to one of my external hard disks. I need to choose some reliable software in order to do this. I have seen True Image 2013 by Acronis which would appear to do the job but is this any good? Any thoughts or suggestions about what to buy would be most appreciated. I have always found that the Windows 7 backup utility takes forever to backup, so something that would speed task up would be much appreciated!

 

[Warbloke]

While there are many backup solutions, some even free and I'm sure will work just fine.... I can certainly confirm Acronis True Image works great.
Its reliable, fast and nice and also easy to use.

I've used various versions over the years since Acronis 2010.

I bought Acronis 2016 recently as I have Windows 10
(I fell lucky as almost bought 2015 but held back a day due to some issues with my new PC, the day after 2016 came out)


True Image 2013 is absolutely fine for Windows 7, but you will know if you plan to upgrade to Win 10 or not... in which case you would want 2016.

As with most solutions like this, once you install it, choose the option to make a 'recovery boot disk', and burn this to your own blank CD.

If the system fails completely and you cant get into Windows, its easy to boot to this CD, and use its menus to recover to a previous backup, which would be stored on your USB connected HDD.



Edit - Id also add.. depending on which version of USB your PC and hard disks are talking at... then the 1st backup could still take a long time as this would be a 'full backup'

Subsequent backups can be 'incremental' backups, so it only backs up what's changed since your last backup.
It explains the different backup types pretty well, so you can see the advantages and disadvantages allowing you to choose the plan that best suits your needs.

 

[androidman]

Thank you, Warbloke. That is very helpful of you and I appreciate it.

I will be certainly staying with Windows 7 for the foreseeable future as I went for the Windows 10 upgrade and it was nothing short of a disaster. It's taken me hours to sort it out and there are still things wrong with my PC even following the rollback to Windows 7. I guess I should have been more patient and waited until they got Windows 10 more sorted out.

Thanks for the additional advice about what sort of backups to make. I will do as you say regarding the recovery Boot disk. Great advice.

Any other thoughts would be appreciated but I think I will be going for True Image 2013.

Many thanks to all the contributors.