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As a follow-up to my question https://superuser.com/questions/247070/disaster-recovery-backup-of-files-photos-for-personal-use, it sounds like for personal disaster-safe backup, multiple rotated hard drives is the way to go.
One of the answers suggested a NAS RAID setup, so after some searching I found a very affordable product that looks really cool, the D-Link 2-bay network storage enclosure.
However, this NAS has some pretty cool features that I would love to use and not just lock away in a box, such as becoming my streaming location for Xbox, etc. It is a 2-bay enclosure, so what I am thinking is that I can buy 3 drives, and keep two of them in the NAS, and one in the fire-proof safe. I would rotate them weekly.
Is this possible with a RAID-1 array? Would it have to wipe the whole drive to rebuild it every time? Does the rebuilding happen automatically? And last question, if it does have to rebuild the whole partition on the drive every time, would this excessive writing reduce drive life?
@rex - RAID is not a backup solution, but it can be part of an implementation - years ago I used triple RAID-1 mirrors as part of a backup solution -- quiesce the database, break off one of the mirrors, then I could let the database continue to run while I did my 18 hour tape backup. I could have just as easily taken out the drives for that mirror and put them in a cabinet as a valid backup, putting in a new set of drives for the next backup. – Johnny – 2014-12-17T19:28:47.933
what are you trying to accomplish with this? RAID is not a backup solution.. – Rex – 2011-02-18T21:03:34.790
@Rex How is RAID-1 not a backup solution? Feel free to follow the link in the first paragraph to find out what I'm trying to accomplish. – Nicole – 2011-02-18T21:09:47.147
http://serverfault.com/questions/2888/why-is-raid-not-a-backup That being said, from your previous post, you are using the NAS as a backup device and what you are really looking for is a backup to the backup. Why not look to buy cloud storage (EC2/etc) from somewhere and host your NAS backup there? – Rex – 2011-02-18T21:29:03.690
@Rex thanks for the link, that makes sense and it's good to be aware to make sure all angles are covered. As far as EC2, it's simply way too expensive. I'm looking to back up 300GB for personal use and growing, and even though, since it's backup, it would be mostly writes and not reads, it's still just not worth the monthly storage cost compared to how many hard drives I could backup to locally. In addition, the initial upload would take forever, and I might get a call from my ISP wondering WTF I am doing. – Nicole – 2011-02-18T21:39:30.350
You could look at something like Carbonite that provides unlimited backup for $55/year per computer.. won't solve the initial seed, but after that, might be worthwhile.. – Rex – 2011-02-18T22:19:56.810
Can also look at crashplan - If you want to look at swapping disks and letting your mirror rebuild all the time, i suppose that could work - problem is it's a manual process prone to forgetfulness or laziness..
I would agree with afrazier below that it would better to find a NAS that allows backup to external disk and take that disk into your safe rather than rotate drives in the mirror – Rex – 2011-02-18T22:27:36.773