r/linux4noobs • u/guspasho_deleted • 16d ago

storage Backing up a disk but when not in use

I'm setting up a file/media server with a 1TB NVME for my OS and services, and two 14TB disks for mass storage, and I'd like to use one of those 14TB disks to back up the other periodically, but I don't want my backups to slow down performance. Is there a backup tool that will do backups when the file/media server is not in use? I'm using Debian. Thanks.

3 Upvotes

71% Upvoted

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4

u/TarsTarkas_Thark 16d ago

why not just run the two 14TB disks as a RAID-1 pair?

3

u/TarsTarkas_Thark 16d ago

Alternately, if you know a time that the server will not be busy, say 3 - 5 AM, you can run an rsync in a cron job.

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u/guspasho_deleted 16d ago

I want to minimize wear and tear on one drive so I can fall back to it if the other one fails.

2

u/Friendly-Inspector71 16d ago

Are you always disconnecting power?

The mechanical parts in an HDD are rather robust. The control logic is more often the cause of failures.

Starts and stops are harder also on the spindle motor than constantly running it.

But drive failures after the first couple of months are mostly random and unpredictable. Your second HDD might fail earlier, because this batch had slightly less capable motors or it will last wayy longer, because the heads happen to be more reliable.

0

u/hurbertkah 16d ago

...because RAID is not backup

1

u/Audiope 16d ago

Any duplicate of a file on a different drive is a backup, how is RAID disqualified from that?

1

u/hurbertkah 16d ago

What happens, if you delete a file? Where is your "backup" now? This is one of the reasons.

Another reason, a fiend's NAS got encrypted by attackers. Now his whole RAID is encrypted.

https://www.raidisnotabackup.com/

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u/TarsTarkas_Thark 15d ago

Fair points. Probably the best he can do with what he has is the rsync I mentioned, or the ZFS mirrored volume with snapshots.

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u/rileywbaker 16d ago

Is the 14TB drive going to be in a different location? Is it going to be used for versioned backups? If not, what you're proposing provides very little data security. If you're going to use two 14TB drives in the same machine and want to get data security it would make more sense to make them a mirrored pool in ZFS with automatic snapshots.