Backing up Synology NAS
Discussion
Arnold Cunningham said:
I lost it due to the poor nature of the WD NAS Raid. It should have been robust to a disk failure, and perhaps for small volumes may have been, but just never came back up again after replacing the failed disk despite appearing to be rebuilding for weeks.
I did have backups - but the raid array was still dead! And that was in the days of only 1TB drives - ie a 4TB NAS.
General issue I have with raid for home use is if the card dies, or you've lost more disks than the raid array is resilient to, or something messes up mid-rebuild, you're pretty screwed. And 1 bad block on a disk buggers the array too, forces a rebuild. I know it "can be done", but it's a lot of fannying about, and I'm just talking about home use where simplicity is important.
So these days I use, and would happily recommend, stablebit drivepool.
On drivepool, the disk itself is still conventionally readable, so even if, say, I lost 7 of the 8 disks I have, I'd easily still be able to restore all available data on that 8th disk just by plugging it into any sata port on a replacement PC. I do only run duplication of all the files on there - so theoretically if I lost 2 disks simultaneously I'd probably lose some files - but more likely, with just a bad block on a couple of disks, I'm unlikely to lose anything. I could turn it up to 3x way, but seems overkill given I have offsite backups now too. It can also handle different disks in the array - IIRC I have 6x 20TB drives and 2x 8TB drives on it at the moment.
And if it detects a disk issue, it automatically migrates everything off that disk, along with periodic scans, inc full surface scan etc.
Not for a moment recommending it for business/enterprise use, but for me, here, it's great - when I did lose a disk, it was easy to sort. Have not had to resort to recovering from backblaze (that I use for remote backup these days) yet.
(And to plug in that many drives, I have some straight on to the motherboard and a few are on a 9260-8i card in IT Mode).
Just to follow up on myself here. I lost a drive over the weekend - it refused to come on line. Drivepool identified it, notified me.I did have backups - but the raid array was still dead! And that was in the days of only 1TB drives - ie a 4TB NAS.
General issue I have with raid for home use is if the card dies, or you've lost more disks than the raid array is resilient to, or something messes up mid-rebuild, you're pretty screwed. And 1 bad block on a disk buggers the array too, forces a rebuild. I know it "can be done", but it's a lot of fannying about, and I'm just talking about home use where simplicity is important.
So these days I use, and would happily recommend, stablebit drivepool.
On drivepool, the disk itself is still conventionally readable, so even if, say, I lost 7 of the 8 disks I have, I'd easily still be able to restore all available data on that 8th disk just by plugging it into any sata port on a replacement PC. I do only run duplication of all the files on there - so theoretically if I lost 2 disks simultaneously I'd probably lose some files - but more likely, with just a bad block on a couple of disks, I'm unlikely to lose anything. I could turn it up to 3x way, but seems overkill given I have offsite backups now too. It can also handle different disks in the array - IIRC I have 6x 20TB drives and 2x 8TB drives on it at the moment.
And if it detects a disk issue, it automatically migrates everything off that disk, along with periodic scans, inc full surface scan etc.
Not for a moment recommending it for business/enterprise use, but for me, here, it's great - when I did lose a disk, it was easy to sort. Have not had to resort to recovering from backblaze (that I use for remote backup these days) yet.
(And to plug in that many drives, I have some straight on to the motherboard and a few are on a 9260-8i card in IT Mode).
I right clicked, removed the drive from the pool and it took a little while to re-duplicate the files that were on that drive (I've got about 45TB of data on the pool,duplicated to make 90TB, spread across 8 drives).
Anyway, it's now running on 7 drives while I wait on a replacement 8th drive to arrive.
The thing I really like is it didn't go off and rebuild the whole array, taking days. Nor did it insist on sitting in a degraded state until I replace the disk.
For home use on a windows PC, I am a big fan of this product.
Slightly annoying about the disk. It only had 932 days of uptime, compared to the highest in the array of 2407. It's a seagate 8TB archive drive. My first generation 8TB archive drives were good (the 2407 one is an example), but the 2nd pair I bought - both have now failed.
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