Best drives for family photo storage: HDD of SSD?

Zitat von macom

RAID is not backup

https://www.arcserve.com/blog/…asons-why-raid-not-backup

RAID does not prevent files from being corrupted.

I would use one drive as the main storage and than the other one for the first backup (read about 3-2-1 backup strategy)

As backup you can use different methods, depending what you want.

Versioning

De-duplication

Encryption

Simplest is rsync. Next is rsnapshot. Then comes borgbackup, Duplicati or restic (and many others)

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Agreed. RAID does not prevent against corruption. RAID is about 3 things: high availability, protecting against down time in the event of a drive failure. If the array is not a RAID 1, it also does bandwidth aggregation allowing the array to operate faster than a single drive and pooling of space to give a volume larger than a single drive.

RAID 1 is a mirror copy, so yes there are 2 copies of the data, but it is not a backup. anything that happens on one drive happens on the other at the same time. ...not a backup, but a failed drive does not bring everything down.

Some filesystems can offer a little bit of bitrot protection, but realistically, it is not something that rears it's ugly head often, and they still don't negate the need for a backup, so the focus should be a backup of important data.

If you want to follow a good backup rule like we have to follow in the Film and Video industry, it is a simple rule that we call the 321 rule. 3 copies of the data, on 2 different storage mediums, 1 of those storage mediums in a different location "off site". The important part is the duplicate copy, preferably in a different location. The 3rd copy for us is about speed of restoring a file since we have 2 independent live copies.

Make as many copies on SSDs as you can and if you have smaller drives doing nothing, maybe store par2 data on them.

Zitat von Newbie404

Hi everyone,

thanks for your reply's. And what I get out of it is that your basicly saying that I don't need a NAS for the purpose I thought I needed it for.

I just need to continue the way I did it (though I only had 2 copy's instead of 3, still I had one drive at home and one drive in my parents house) just need to sync more often.

Are there also Windows programs that can check the file status (corrupt or not) and get the healthy file from the second drive and copy it to the first drive?

Nothing I am aware of in Windows that will intelligently check for corruption, as corruption can mean several things. A corrupt files can sometimes even be opened but the data inside may not be correct or complete. For example, you may have at some point opened a jpeg image that only displays part of the image. The file can be opened, but the image is not complete or is "garbled" part way down the picture. In this case, the file header/container is ok, but the enclosed data is bad. In a case like that there is no way to determine if the image is right or not without looking at it.

There are sync programs like free file sync or beyond compare that can do a bitwise comparison, but once again without looking at the file, or image as mentioned in the example, the program does not know which one is correct.

As for not needing a NAS, It is essentially just a file server and it still is a good place to use as a repository for your data and can be configured to automatically back up from the repository to a drive that you plug in occasionally or even to do a remote backup to another off site NAS with some fancy internet connection configuration between the two.

It is up to you if you want to use one in such a way, but the key once again is backups of the important stuff.

Once again though, file corruption on a file that is not being actively used is rare, if the medium that the file is stored on is sound. Corruption is more likely during a bad save, copy or move. I have files on my OMV system that are 20 or more years old, copied from smaller/older drives every time I have replace the drives with newer/larger ones, that I can still open and are still fine. I do tend to replace my drives every 5 to 7 years as a preventative maintenance measure, and to increase the available storage as drives get larger and the accumulated data increases.

Zitat von Newbie404

check the file status (corrupt or not)

I thought rsync did that, but I don't see the option. However, it would be trivial to script something that gets a known good hash, saves it to a file along with the path, then uses that saved information to check the files. "rhash" is the lastest hasher I tried, it was stdout friendly: https://github.com/rhash/RHash "7z.exe" can compute a few hashes. par2.exe can create a verification stub but at a much, much higher cost of disk space.

I thought rsync did ~"If file bad, overwrite with good"... I would of sworn I've done this with rsync, I'm 99.9% positive I wrote a script that did this once upon a time.