Best Way to Back up Music Library

[DavidHB]

(04-06-2015 16:05)gnomus Wrote:  I speak from a position of ignorance, of course, but, some time back, I did see a post (I think from Simon) that pointed out that the second drive in did not provide a 'back up' as such - if a file became corrupted it simply meant that the corrupted file was duplicated.

That's not exactly the way it works. There are different sorts of RAID arrays, but the concept of true RAID is that, if a disk fails, the rest of the multi-disk system contains the wherewithal to reconstruct the contents of the failed disk on the replacement. In effect, the array repairs itself. This reconstruction is of the whole data structure, rather than of individual files, and it tends to take a long time, which is a significant disadvantage. For a fuller and more technical description, see this Wikipedia article.

(04-06-2015 16:05)gnomus Wrote:  It is a little expensive buying all these second drives, and I am wondering if I might be better off just having singles in my Synology - or setting it up as one large 6TB storage device. I'd be interested in what folks thought of this idea.

Your single large drive idea is RAID 0. Unless you really need a 6TB drive, it's actually a bad idea for a home system, because it is more vulnerable than two separate drives. In this configuration, if one drive goes down, you lose all the data on both drives. Retaining just one drive on the Synology might be possible, but you would need to reformat that drive, and would therefore lose the data on it. I don't know the specifics of this for your Synology. It is also usually possible to have a NAS treat individual disks as separate drives; again I don't know the specifics of that for your system, though re-formatting would again be required.

I thought quite hard about what sort of array to have on my NAS, largely because data redundancy means that you do not get the full benefit of all the disk space you have bought. In the end, I went with the manufacturer's default array, because it was the most straightforward to set up, and it does provide increased data security, though not to the point of making backups unnecessary.

David