Making bootable back up of whooping 3Tb

[Mega-Japan]

I have nearly 3Tb spread over 4 HDD's. Now I'm looking for a way to back all this up in one 3Tb HDD (or 2 1.5Tb?). What is the best way to proceed with this? Buy a bare internal 3Tb HDD? External WD/Seagate one?

I really hate doing fresh OS installs unless I get brand new built, so if I main drive were to fail, I would want to unplug it, plug the back up one, good to go.

 

[Mussels]

just work on a better setup.

single drive for OS, single drive for games, all the rest as storage.


that way you only need a backup of the OS drive itself.

 

[Mega-Japan]

just work on a better setup.

single drive for OS, single drive for games, all the rest as storage.


that way you only need a backup of the OS drive itself.

I'm not sure I get you.
I have the HDD's in a good set up. 1Tb HDD for nothing but video. Another Tb for more videos and misc files. Then OS HDD. I could indeed make simple back up of just OS drive, but what if one of the other drives end up failing?

Speaking of which, would I have to do a fresh install to set up a RAID 1? Never done one before.

 

[Mussels]

you would need to format any drives you want to put in any kind of RAID array.


odds of drive failure are really low after they've been in use for a few months.


you can either have a 1:1 backup of each drive (easiest in RAID 1), run a raid 5 array for redundancy for drive failure, or not bother with backing up anything but the OS.


i've got 15TB of storage here and very rarely lose any data. it'd just cost way too much to set up a fileserver on raid 5 to be worth it.

 

[Mega-Japan]

I think I have an idea of what I want to do now.
The OS drive is a 300Gb, and I have 2 of them. Will do RAID 1 on that.
And I'll buy a 3Tb internal to back up the rest. Is that good?

Also, any tips on back up software?

 

[Mussels]

i put everything on externals and power them off when not in use, so i have no need of backups.

apart from new drives failing, i never lose any data.

 

[Rock N Roll Rebel]

I think I have an idea of what I want to do now.
The OS drive is a 300Gb, and I have 2 of them. Will do RAID 1 on that.
And I'll buy a 3Tb internal to back up the rest. Is that good?

Also, any tips on back up software?

for backup software i use acronis true image it works good for me

 

[n-ster]

Why not just do 1 big RAID?

 

[Mega-Japan]

After giving it several thoughts, I ended up buying a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk 3TB, and will make a RAID 1 for just the OS HDD.
I've also used CASPER to back up/clone my HDD's before, and it worked impeccably, so I'll continue to use that. Thank you all.

 

[wiak]

depends on what you want to have
steam games you can re-download
if you realy want to backup use tape or something in that storage family, harddrives are unreliable for backups

RAID is not backup, its more of a fail safe in case of a harddrive crash

 

[CBRworm]

After giving it several thoughts, I ended up buying a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk 3TB, and will make a RAID 1 for just the OS HDD.
I've also used CASPER to back up/clone my HDD's before, and it worked impeccably, so I'll continue to use that. Thank you all.

I have to warn you, that 3tb 7,200 RPM drive (assuming it is the same one I got) will cook itself in that enclosure. I have one, and love it, but I have taken the drive out of the enclosure for the time being. It is a very impressive drive, but I was seeing over 60C within an hour of starting to copy stuff over to it via USB3. I can only imagine what it would be after 5 hours of steady copying.