How does this Backup plan sound? [closed]

Question

I currently have a notebook and a Readynas that holds all of my music/movies. I rotate cloned backups of the notebook that are stored on the Readynas. The notebook is also backed up to an online service.

I'm thinking about replacing the notebook with a desktop. In the desktop, I would put a 2TB hard drive and move everything off the Readynas to the desktop so that it can all be backed up online.

Then I could just use a normal external drive for my nightly clones.

Does this sound like it would work? After all these years, I'm not sure why I really need the Readynas. Seems like overkill. And my media files would load faster if they were on the same hard drive as iTunes.

Thanks for any feedback.

Answer 1

Im inclined to agree with you that the Readynas is a bit overkill for media...but that's my opinion. You could put a different value on your media than i do. It sounds like a very sound plan though from the point of view of disaster recovery. You mentioned moving everything to the desktop and then backing that up online, that sounds like a pretty good plan.

Answer 2

This sounds like a fine plan.

If your data is very valuable to you (and it sounds like it is), you might want to think about the possibility of RAIDing hard disks, since this would give you almost instant recovery from a hard disk failure. Most high-end motherboards have a RAID controller built in, so this would only run you the cost of the duplicate 2TB drive (RAID mirroring, or RAID 1, is the way to go in this situation, since you get full recoverability with only two drives rather than needing three or four). This has the same result as cloning to an external drive, but the hardware's all internal and the disks are never out of sync. Recovering a RAID array from a disk failure ("rebuilding" the array) can be a little less than user friendly, but read the manual for your RAID controller and you won't have trouble.