Hello!! Some recent technical problems on my family’s NAS gave me a big scare and finally pushed me to figure out a way to back it all up. I’m asking here specifically because I really don’t know where to even starts because of the fact I’ve got just under 50 terabytes worth of data stored in a 7-disk RAID-5 and would prefer to keep it cheap. What are your suggestions?
Edit: thank you for all the suggestions, I’ll probably be considering using Backblaze for backups, or perhaps seeing if I can scrounge up old unused disks from people I know. Thank you all again <3
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First: there is no cheap way to back this amount of data up. AWS Glacier would be about $200/mo, PLUS bandwidth transfer charges, which would be something like $500. R2 would be about $750/mo, no transfer charges. So assume that most companies with some sort of whacky, competing product would be billed by either of these companies with you as a consumer, and you can figure out how this is the baseline of what you’ll be getting charged from them.
50TB of what? If it’s just readily available stuff you can download again, skip backing that up. Only keep personal effects, and see how much you can reduce this number by.
Backblaze personal is about the cheapest I know of: $99 per year unlimited. Caveats would be that the drives have to be physically connected to the computer doing the backup. Additionally, should you ever need to restore the backup, the best way would be to buy a 10 tb drive from Backblaze, restore the data, then send the drive back for a full refund x 5. Restoring 50 tb online would be excruciating.
I’m currently backing up my NAS to Backblaze Personal by mounting the drives using Dokany. They appear as local drives and the Backblaze client accepts them for backup.
But isn’t it available only for Windows/macOS?
Yeah, on Linux it is better to use their B2 service
First thing is decide what data you have that can be readily replaced. e.g. publicly available Linux ISOs. Then remove that from your backup strategy. You may end up with a lot less data needing backup.
Tape is still the cheapest and best archival medium. Drives are expensive, but the actual tape is cheap. But 50TB might not be enough to justify.
The tape drive costs more or less 2000€ (without VAT), the tapes cost about 80-100 for a 15tb drive (and compressed capacity doesnt count as the to be backed up data is probably not just a database or text.
Don’t think there are much economic options beside finding the cheapest S3 storage or a secondary backup server.
My suggestion: Buy 3x 28TB drives. Mirror the data to them. Then move them off site.
The off-site location could either be a family member’s home where you can then sync to the drives over the internet. Or in a PO box nearby that you retrieve them from time to time to re-sync the data.
That is the cheapest option. Maybe the most convenient or most reliable option, but definitely the cheapest.
Slightly provocative take:
Let it go, it doesn’t matter. The desire to hoard data is, like hoarding money, understandable but unnecessary. What do you do with all this media. Your time on this planet is finite.Install W11… your data will be backed up…just not the way you want it.
