In the backup realm

I am running a Synology NAS server for the last few years at home. Everything was OK all the time but recently the worst happened. The system became unresponsive, lost performance and it stopped to work in few days after a system update. Later on, I figured out that one of the NAS hard drives had to be replaced due to a huge number of bad sectors. In my opinion this was the real reason for the failure I encountered.

Of course, I had a backup but a small fraction of just newly available data was not in the backup set yet. Secondly, I have a lot media such as serials, movies etc. which are not backed up at all. My backup solution is CrashPlan and I was seeing endless days of data restore. The only alternative was a scanning and a repairing of the current disks. This was a hell. I had to buy a docking station from Inateck for my two hard disks. The docking station was attached to various laptops with “on the fly” Linux Ubuntu installation. I am saying “various” because the first one could not find the disks, the second one was having some video driver problems and the third one was just the right one. The RAID recovery instructions were just ridiculous but after few days of try / false attempts I was able to extract 100% of the data and save it to a Samsung USB external drive (which I just bought).

The above situation reconsidered my backup strategy. Scott Hanselman has a wonderful post about Synology setup and CrashPlan. In his blog you can find also few related articles which are the foundation of my research and opinion about backups. Right now, I am using the same Synology DS213+ with two new hard drives (WD), a tiny Gigabyte Mini Computer (GB-BXBT-2807) and the already mentioned Samsung M3 portable drive. I have one copy in the cloud via CrashPlan, one local copy via the Synology and one on a site copy via the portable hard drive. The mini computer is synchronzing the cloud and the local copy. So, that’s it my new backup!