OK, so I've been researching and researching recently, and my head is spinning from a World of contradictory and conflating "advice" online. I've even posted on various tech and computer focused forums, and it seems to just bring our people more interested in expressing their opinion and being more right th a other people rather than advising on the original post.

I've heard and read so much about JBOD, Windows Storage Spaces, Columns, Drivepool, SoftRAID, SnapRAID, GoodSync, Backupper, Acronis, Macrorit, and all sorts of other solutions.

I am NOT interested in "just use a NAS" as I only have 1GbE that would be slow and NAS solutions are not included in Backblaze account, so is not an option.

So, I thought I'd try here.

My systems that I use are:

• DESKTOP (main system) - Windows 11 Pro, AMD 5950X, 128GB DDR RAM, GTX 1070 Ti
• LAPTOP 1 (used infrequently as portable alternative to main system) - Windows 11 Pro, Intel Cire i7 8750H, 32GB DDR4 RAM, GTX 1050 Ti
• LAPTOP 2 (used as home DJ laptop and daily driver for browsing etc) - Windows 11 Pro, Intel Core i7 8650U, 16GB DDR4 RAM

The internal drives on each are:

• DESKTOP - 2TB NVMe (OS drive), 2 x 4TB NVMe, 2 x 4TB SSD
• LAPTOP 1 - 2TB NVMe (OS drive), 4TB SSD
• LAPTOP 2 - 2TB NVMe

My desktop is my main machine and has all mission critical data on the various internal drives.

I have a bunch of hard drives and an external enclosure, including:

• TerraMaster D6-320 6 bay USB 3.2 Gen 3 10Gbps enclosure
• 4 x 18TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro HDDs
• 2 x 8TB Seagate HDDs (shucked)
• 2 x 5TB Seagate HDDs (shucked)

I am looking for the best way to set these up and use them that will allow me to:

• have a full backup of my desktop
• a full secondary local backup/redundancy of my backup
• space for usable non mission critical data, such as less frequently used Kontakt libraries etc

The above will all also be backed up to my Backblaze account for cloud based off site backup.

Looking for any ideas or wisdom on how to best set the above up and stop my head spinning

 

Past anyone here's lifetime, thee will be user Petabyte cloud backups.... for now, assessing the sheer sizes you have, I'd do one thing if you do not wish to use cloud backup.

O/S system clones and irreplaceable documents/creations/photos only. This is because all the installation and registry/HAL etc information will be there on a system clone restore. Applications you can reinstall.

Unless you have a direct link, 100TB+ based on your specs is SLOW for a cloud backup.
You can always have it mirrored to a Datacenter server space but it is not cheap and is way faster. You only need to do incremental backups then. It's expensive though because they guarantee the data integrity and have their own failsafe systems in-place.
Cloud is actually cheaper, just slow for more than 100 terabytes which you seem to possess.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jun 23, 2024