Advice on large 3TB library sought
Hello. I just purchased true image and have a question on backing up some media libraries.
I have a couple large libraries - 2TB and 3TB. The original files reside on a NAS with a Raid 5 setup, so I already have a level of protection there (along with a battery back up connected). That said, I'm using True Image to create a second copy just in case something happens to the NAS. It took too many years to collect the media, and I want to take steps (within reason) to protect. For the more 'personal' files - family pictures and my music collection, I'll also either send to a cloud service or leave an external drive at a friends house and update occasionally.
Anyways - my question relates to the large libraries. I add very little content on a regular basis versus the size of the libraries. Maybe I add 50 GB a month to the 3TB library. Given it takes hours to create a backup of this size, and the minimal monthly additions, I have set the backup scheme to incremental, but wonder if there is any point/value in creating a full version again after a certain number of additions. I've set the update schedule to weekly, but maybe I should do monthly ... if I lose the last months content I would be indifferent.
Do I need to create full versions every few months or would switching the backup frequency from weekly to monthly incrementals, and maybe doing a full version every 12-24 suffice (unless I made some major changes). That's what I'm leaning to as I reflect on it ... would probably also put less stress on the hard-drive vs. rewriting a full back up every few weeks.
Thanks for any advice!
Ken, please take a look at the information and guides in the Best Practices Forum, in particular Grovers Accumulated Wisdom where there are lots of examples of the different backup scenarios available in ATIH 2016.
On the subject of using incremental backup images, I would advice exercising caution in choosing this particular type of backup scheme if your data is very important. By definition, an incremental backup image will only contain any changes made to the source data since either the last full backup or the last incremental backup, which is fine in principle but in practice it means that in order to restore from your full backup version chain, that each and every incremental image that form that chain must be present and free from any error or corruption.
If any one of the incrementals in a version chain fails for any reason (disk defect, corruption, accidental deletion etc), then the version chain beyond the point of the last good image file is lost and cannot be recovered.
I would not recommend adopting any backup scheme that involves creating large numbers of incremental images.
Thanks Steve and Bobbo. Is there anyway to check if an incremental is damaged? Your combined advice is awesome and I'm now leaning to monthly incrementals, and maybe rewriting the entire back up twice a year as Bobbo is doing. As above, I do have the content on a NAS with Raid 5 redundancy, so there is an initial level of protection there as well. And as Bobbo points out, the majority of the content is not super important to, but I'd like to take reasonable steps to make it pretty unlikely that I would lose it due to hardware failure (and take the extra step to backup the sentimental content like family photos for offsite storage of course).
Again - I appreciate the help. This has been a bit of a project for me - I knew little about NAS, RAID, and software backup solutions a month ago, and now think I've assembled a pretty good solution. It was nagging away at me at the back of my mind for almost two years when two hard drives blew at once and I lost a ton of data (one was mechanical, the other I deleted files accidentally and timing was awful!), and wanted to take steps to help prevent (within reasonable limits) the liklihood of that repeating. Between my NAS and second copy through Acronis, I feel pretty good.
Hey - just thought of a follow up question. Any perspective/knowledge around fully backing up a 3TB image/directory on a frequent basis (say a few times a year) onto a 5 or 6 TB internal hard drive puts unwanted stress on a hard drive - in turn possibly promoting failure or corruption (ironcially the activity is designed to protect from that!). I assume reading off the NAS is harmless, but I wonder about deleting the old back up writing a new on a relatively frequent basis.
Ken, the only option to check if an incremental is good or not is to use the Validation option for the backup task that created the image - if you look to the right side of the task name you will see (\/) which opens a drop-down menu where you will find the Validation option.
I wouldn't worry about reads and writes too much if you're considering more frequent full backups. Plus, if you do things right, you can do one extra full, say once a week (or month), leaving your existing backup scheme in place with the incremetals for everythign in between - just offset when the fulls take place so there is less time between them as well (example: Weekly incremental backup with fulls on Monday... supplementary full backup every other week on Thursdays) and you'll still be well within the drive usability specs.
Drives are going to read/write constantly regardless of your backups. Basically though, plan on a drive only being as good as the warranty on it. In most cases, a drive will far outlive the warranty, but it really depends on how well it was constructed, luck of the draw, etc. Even a good drive with a 5 year warranty can be a lemon or just not live up to the expected timeframe because of things like ambient temperature constantly being too high, running them 24/7 when they are only designed to be 8x7, etc.
Most cheap SATA mechanical drives just are NOT meant to be used 24/7. NAS specific drives (WD red or similar) are though. Other drives like WD black or enterprise drives are also designed to run 24/7 and have backgroudn health checks running on the disk as well. If using cheaper WD blues or similar drives that usually only have a 2 year warranty, you're more likely to see failure sooner than later, but it's really just good environmental use and luck of the draw for how long a drive will really last.
Long story short, don't let your backups determine the health of your driv and don't limit backups because you're worried about shortening the drive life. Running a full backup every couple of days, weeks, or months will still be within drives operating specs for reads/writes. It's things like letting drives run 24/7 for long durations (if the drive is only menat for 8x7 usage) that is more likely to reduce the life span of the drive. All drives WILL eventually fail though, so a good backup plan with multiple backup locations gives you the best chance of recovery. I'd rather spend an extra $100 on a second drive and run offset backups on each to have dual backup protection (and chance of recovery) while hopefully extending the life of both drives, than putting all my backups on a single drive and hoping it doesn't fail at some point when I really need it.