All about RAID is not BACKUP, general discussion

[fredbert]

@Telos It's still a backup

The house burning down or a burglary pretty much has the same level of risk to a USB drive or secondary NAS, should they be resident in the same place ... less so if in a different building on the property (but would require a very long USB cable!).

Using a second storage pool to hold the backed up data from the NAS's primary storage pool is a lot better than nothing but does carry the risk of always having the data accessible within the NAS. As such there is a risk of malware infection on the NAS wiping both storage pools. Given this is pretty much the same as a directly attached USB/eSATA drive, then these drives also carry this risk from malware.

Given that I don't have two properties then I can't fully address the house burning down/burglary risks but I can do something about malware risks: use a second budget NAS and external drives with it. I can even place these at different locations in the house. And use offsite for the small subset of most important data.


I suppose Backup should be understood more as a strategy or plan that you adopt and backing up is the process is that you do to achieve it. As such, it's necessary to have an understanding of what's going on in the technology that you use and also know what it's not doing too: there's not much space given on packaging and fliers to enable consumers to come to the realisation of "oh, this probably isn't for me" or "but I still need to buy/do something else".

 

[Telos]

The house burning down or a burglary pretty much has the same level of risk to a USB drive or secondary NAS, should they be resident in the same place

Yea... bad examples, maybe better is a NAS controller failure that crashes the pools.

Otherwise, running folder snapshots (without replication) would be called "backup" by this method. Would you call this sufficient? Or maybe we could say Backup is not BACKUP

 

[jeyare]

OFC
but you can write this notice for each external places of stored backup data. A reason, what it wasn't mentioned by me.

there is still valid mentioned definition:
“a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere”
And elsewhere is also meaning = another bay.

I wouldn’t like mix kind of backups (places, how many places, media, ...) into this thread. it could be over mixed meal menu for newbies.
We can create new thread with such topic. Step by step

 

[jeyare]

yes we can write what kind of backup is better, but we need also take into consideration = for whom.

This data operation world is pretty different for many persons, companies, ...
Then we can write a guide for some segments and it will up to each member what kind of backup policy they will chose. Their data = their responsibility = their costs.
We can just help them to better understand some Pros/Cons of our point of view.

 

[JobUz]

This is great stuff. On a side note, RAID is a method of managing multiple disks. Depending on the the chosen method, RAID can provide some redundancy and/or performance benefits. The RAID itself is not backup.

I backup my desktops to a NAS that has a RAID 10 volume and I consider that a backup. If that same NAS was not using any form of RAID, I would still consider it a backup. Point being, RAID and backup are two different things. If I started a business using one of my desktops tomorrow, I would no longer consider it an acceptable backup.

A 'backup plan' is valid as long as it meets the users expectations. My media library is on that same NAS (utilizing RAID 10). My backup plan was to restore from the original disks. I considered the original disk an acceptable backup plan until the library grew to a point that I am no longer willing to rebuild the library from scratch. So I'm going to add a second NAS. The RAID, if any, that is utilized on the second NAS has nothing to do with it being a backup.

My plan is acceptable to me. The bottom line is, backup has nothing to do with RAID. That said, I've seen the phrase 'RAID is not backup' overused to the point where people think the two are somehow related. The redundancy provided by RAID is to keep operations running until repairs can be made. That redundancy is not a backup, if it was, it would have been called BAID.