Network Attached Storage recommendations

[eldog]

now you've got me interested and i'm relearning/reading/discovering windows 8

just because you run your crap on crap, doesn't mean you can't install nix on a quiet little box in the corner and have it save the world for you, frequently, and without fuckup nor headache. which, since you seem to be worried about time, will give you more to ride your bike.

fixed yr first part

I had thought of doing something similar to what you suggested above (nix/box)in the past. I dont have the $/time/knowledge to set it at at present.

But I tried to shortcut/buy propietary gear- WD MyCloud Mirror using Smartware to back up multiple boxes - worked great on boxes with small hard disk footprints, kept track of changes and updated etc no worries. When it came to larger system I think it became overwhelmed with the amount of files. Writing this makes me wonder if I have hit a barrier (no of files in a directory/subdirectories) I am going to have to check it out

The WD NAS is great, easy to setup, runs nice and quiet (no fan-but i have a small personal one which i turn on just in case) would recommend it. The Smartware has improved from the previous versions which sucked the life out of all but the most powerful computer. For small personal use that would suit most people its great for the non technical use. Just doesnt cut it for this one task.
The WD service is good, but i am guessing its the shear size and quantity it was always on the back foot on this one task.

[Erelyes]

RAID 6 is your best option

I'd have thought that Snapraid is the go for the home user these days. You can start with already filled disks, add more disks later... and a bunch of other shit std RAID can't do.

[Gremlin]

I had thought of doing something similar to what you suggested above (nix/box)in the past. I dont have the $/time/knowledge to set it at at present.

I was running 2x WD MyBook Live Duo (earlier model to my cloud), until one fell over. Annoyingly enough, no alerts no nothing until the second drive was failing. Kinda defeated the purpose

Now got my old PC setup with FreeNAS, but god, I deal with tech all week, last thing I really want to do is my own tech in the weekend... got one drive failing and haven't got around to replacing for a month? shit... a month. s'ok, I've got dual parity

Perhaps tomorrow. Supposed to be raining. I know I should have used some disk tray setup. Just thinking of pulling the machine and I lose the will to live

[eldog]

I was running 2x WD MyBook Live Duo (earlier model to my cloud), until one fell over. Annoyingly enough, no alerts no nothing until the second drive was failing. Kinda defeated the purpose

Now got my old PC setup with FreeNAS, but god, I deal with tech all week, last thing I really want to do is my own tech in the weekend... got one drive failing and haven't got around to replacing for a month? shit... a month. s'ok, I've got dual parity

Perhaps tomorrow. Supposed to be raining. I know I should have used some disk tray setup. Just thinking of pulling the machine and I lose the will to live

I know the feeling well.
My Boss supports my riding so i get a life away from work.
trouble is you know what the pitfalls are and how long it will take.
in the end its only a matter of keeping the smoke in the wires, no smoke no go.

I havent had a drive fail yet, seen plenty of others die a sudden death. Most of those were the way they were treated-hard drives are delicate, not frisbees.

sympathy about second drive going on the fritz, trouble is the user has no idea about the health unless they run chkdsk or similar often.
Used to be PCTOOLS/Norton you could run to get some idea..... the good old days

Got my practise run for the 1KC tomorrow/Sunday so will give it a think about then.

[Akzle]

I know the feeling well.
My Boss supports my riding so i get a life away from work.
trouble is you know what the pitfalls are and how long it will take.
in the end its only a matter of keeping the smoke in the wires, no smoke no go.

I havent had a drive fail yet, seen plenty of others die a sudden death. Most of those were the way they were treated-hard drives are delicate, not frisbees.

sympathy about second drive going on the fritz, trouble is the user has no idea about the health unless they run chkdsk or similar often.
Used to be PCTOOLS/Norton you could run to get some idea..... the good old days

Got my practise run for the 1KC tomorrow/Sunday so will give it a think about then.

again. Nix. Smartmontools. Cron. Can be run at boot if our shit gets rebooted, or periodically if you're 100% uptime.
Hdparm to set maximum number of bad sectors tolerable.

[Gremlin]

I havent had a drive fail yet, seen plenty of others die a sudden death. Most of those were the way they were treated-hard drives are delicate, not frisbees.

I'm sure quality is going down hill. Tracking just under 700 drives for work, 8 have failed outside warranty, 43 have failed inside warranty... Doesn't include those retired from service (age etc). It used to be a real surprise when a drive died, now it's more ho-hum...

I bought 5 WD Red for my NAS, they've got a good reputation. Then I decided to increase the drives to 6 and bought 2 Seagate for variety, putting them in the raid and keeping 1 WD as a replacement.

1 Seagate started failing within a month. Fucken Seagate

[Akzle]

I'm sure quality is going down hill. Tracking just under 700 drives for work, 8 have failed outside warranty, 43 have failed inside warranty... Doesn't include those retired from service (age etc). It used to be a real surprise when a drive died, now it's more ho-hum...

I bought 5 WD Red for my NAS, they've got a good reputation. Then I decided to increase the drives to 6 and bought 2 Seagate for variety, putting them in the raid and keeping 1 WD as a replacement.

1 Seagate started failing within a month. Fucken Seagate

my seagate cuda 2t going hard for years. Isnt alwaly on, is in usb3 enclosure atm, gets dropped in the bottom of my backpack, used as a coaster, removed from enclosure and plugged in and out of towers, other cases etc. Been reformatted and zeroed, urandomed at least a half dozen times. Has had millions of files on and off (my tarballs now on anotther disc, so mainly lots of individual files on it, movies, audio etc)

think i've had about a dozen files corrupted on it (cp, not rsyncd) so my own fault really.

Had wd blues, blacks, lunched a half dozen of em. Got a 320gb that's survived but i wouldnt rank them.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/

[Akzle]

I had thought of doing something similar to what you suggested above (nix/box)in the past. I dont have the $/time/knowledge to set it at at present.

funny. Cos you seem to be throwing a lot of time and money at things that dont work.

But as ocean would tell ya, it's your time and money to do with what you will.

[Gremlin]

Had wd blues, blacks, lunched a half dozen of em. Got a 320gb that's survived but i wouldnt rank them.

Only got a handful of blues, I think every one failed. Actively avoided them.

[eldog]

Gremlin-Akzle

Thanks for the input.
Way back I used to use Seagate had no problems just got replaced - size/speed

I will have to check out reliabilty on my current system(s) thats why I am finally tackling backup etc - properly.

Re spending $ - I have far too much data which I have created myself to recreate any of it. Hence my thoughts about reliably resurrecting it on another computer/setup.

I dont trust MS File History or a Cloud solution except for something i can loose or as a means of easy file transfer.

I have been putting off quite a few projects over the years, now is my chance of getting rid of them. ATM Buying a solution is the easiest way of sorting this.

[Big Dog]

Do you perhaps have a 32 bit os? Or one updated from a 32 bit os?

The 256 character issue should be long gone with 64 bit unless you have residual 32 bit drivers or your file system was.

Once you have a good backup you should be able to rebuild your file system if you don't want to be limited.
You may need to locate a hotfix.


Sent via tapatalk.

[Big Dog]

Acronis would be my choice for os backup.


Mostly because it is also pretty good for data recovery.

Depends a lot on what you are backing up.
as I said I use robocopy a lot for high volume static files. Static files and most dynamic files should copy even when in use if you have your options and permissions right. To copy system files you need to be operating as a service. Note: you will not be able to restore your os directly from this backup but you will be able to recover altered files damaged during an operation like updates.

For dynamic files we use fsbackup for urgent one off backups of file trees or small volumes. This also has the advantage of breaking backups into files easily transferred with explorer or ftp over slow links.

Storage craft for managed system or volume backups.

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[pete376403]

I'm sure quality is going down hill. Tracking just under 700 drives for work, 8 have failed outside warranty, 43 have failed inside warranty... Doesn't include those retired from service (age etc). It used to be a real surprise when a drive died, now it's more ho-hum...

I bought 5 WD Red for my NAS, they've got a good reputation. Then I decided to increase the drives to 6 and bought 2 Seagate for variety, putting them in the raid and keeping 1 WD as a replacement.

1 Seagate started failing within a month. Fucken Seagate

WD reds are supposed to be NAS rated. I'll see if I can find where I read that NAS rated doesn't actually mean that much.
Found it at Spiceworks.com:

Scott Alan Miller Jan 21, 2013 at 6:16 AM
Niagara Technology Group (NTG) is an IT service provider.


WD Red drives are WD Green drives with TLER added, nothing more. They are aimed purely at small consumer usage, not for normal business RAID usage. The issues with parity rebuild failures due to URE (the key issues with RAID 5, but far from its only one) are not addressed by any consumer-range drive, WD Green being no exception and therefore Red not being an exception. TLER simply prevents the drives from unnecessarily dropping out of the array, not from failing to rebuild. So WD Red are perfect for low performance, low cost RAID 10 and, in smaller arrays, RAID 6 (in really large RAID 6 they are still too risky to use because of the URE issue.)

WD's enterprise drives that "could be" used in RAID 5 are the RE4 line which have the TLER of the Red drives, the URE rating of enterprise SAS drives, the spindle speed of Black drives and other advancements like bigger cache and CPU to boost performance over any other WD SATA drive.

The issue when you get a drive like the RE4 for RAID 5 is that RAID 5 remains slow (as all parity does) and risky for other reasons (drive failure rates, DAC, long rebuild times meaning loss of availability, etc.) but gets so expensive that RAID 6 and RAID 10 still beat it when actual dollars are applied. So RAID 5 is always ruled out, in every scenario, due to a large combination of factors.

So, no, Red does nothing for RAID 5.

[eldog]

Thanks Pete, I will now have to take the computer apart and see what is actually part of my raid 10 setup.
I have another group of smaller drives from an older system I will look into that as well.

The WD NAS MYCloud is easy to remove the cover and see what they are.

Its a bugger to know but its better to get it right before it all goes wrong i guess

[eldog]

Acronis would be my choice for os backup. Mostly because it is also pretty good for data recovery.

Depends a lot on what you are backing up.
as I said I use robocopy a lot for high volume static files. Static files and most dynamic files should copy even when in use if you have your options and permissions right. To copy system files you need to be operating as a service. Note: you will not be able to restore your os directly from this backup but you will be able to recover altered files damaged during an operation like updates.

For dynamic files we use fsbackup for urgent one off backups of file trees or small volumes. This also has the advantage of breaking backups into files easily transferred with explorer or ftp over slow links.

Storage craft for managed system or volume backups.

Sent via tapatalk.

Acronis has a trial use period which i am making use of to see if i am happy to trust it.
I started it Friday arvo may go into tomorrow and check

The WD Smartware has been on for MONTHS and still has 50 GB to backup.

However it did work on much smaller systems with no problems at all.

Lots of the files would be static, when I am working a complete new design there is approx 250-500 files being modified at once (most are in the background and are referenced) I left the software take care of whats required to be updated
I am often surprised at the effects of opening 1 file has only lots of others - I am talking CAD files mostly

I got hauled over the coals recently about Internet useage - mbike stuff and a fair amount of work stuff, however it wasnt me it was someone else watching the RWC, while I was away. So I tend to keep away from Cloud based products.