Raid isn't backup, it's redundancy. It will keep you going even if a drive fails. If you run a basic NAS without RAID you'd have to buy a new drive each time a failure occurs, and you'd have to restore data from a second drive before you can proceed. That's why you RAID, to not spend all that time waiting. But RAID still isn't a backup, you still need the data on other devices and locations as well.
Good advice. Aside from possible loss of the machine (fire, theft etc), as drives age, it's not uncommon for another drive in a set to fail while you're trying to rebuild after replacing a failed drive.
I use a NAS raid for backing up my Mac, but I also use nightly backup to Backblaze to store a copy of my data offsite. About 15 years ago I lost years worth of data when my NAS failed during a restore after my computer drive failed. Lesson learned.
@@PeterEsquire I do it, it's really not hard. At home I have pictures local on computer, cloned to a NAS, and backed up to the cloud (specifically Adobe via Lightroom in this case). I'm honestly considering dropping the NAS as cloud backups are accessible from anywhere. I get home and copy pictures to both the PC which is set to auto-sync to the NAS and then upload to Lightroom. Just set and forget. When traveling pictures are copied to laptop, an external drive, and kept on the SD card. When I leave the hotel room the external drive comes w/ me. Hotel room burns down? Still have my photos. Get mugged? Still have my photos. SD card fails? Still have my photos (except the new ones from that day... not much to do there unless the camera supports dual cards). At the end of the trip plug in the external drive and do the same import process to both local/NAS and Lightroom. It's really just about establishing a procedure that becomes habit. It's not arduous if it's second nature and just the thing you do when you get home.
I do it, and it is so simple, e.g. either your older NAS which you used until 5 years ago and an external harddrive which you plug into your symbology NAS and run the automated incremental backup procedure. A matter of minutes.
HI, I'm in IT, setting up NAS for a long time... just be careful , there is a difference with Mirror 2 NAS and Backup from 1 nas to another.... the mirror will replicate what you do, so if you delete a file, the delete will be replicated. a backup on the other hand, will keep an history ( that you define ) so you can go back in time. ALSO, on the synology, when you setup your file system to BTRFS ( hope you did ) , you can create snapshot of you volumes, this is useful for several situation like cryptoware. do your research , there is a lot of security that is helpful in your case
people don't want to spend on backups until they hear price of data recovery. also, there is chant in IT repeat after me: RAID is NOT a backup. please do backups. raid will save in case of one or more (dependent on level) drive failure, but depending on raid system failing raid controller, memory corruption, unintentional/malicious deletion, ransomware, user error etc. raid will fail to protect you in most of these cases there are exceptions with certain systems like ZFS raids have snapshots so you can somewhat turn back time but still backup. Ideally 3-2-1 rule 3 copies of data on at least 2 different mediums and 1 offsite.
I told my wife a NAS was the best solution for a safe backup (+ an extra portable harddrive). When it arrived both included harddrives were broken out of the box. So yeah, that didn't give me a lot of peace of mind. In the end, I still have it, it has served me for 13 years now, although both drives are full and I'm using a big standalone HDD as main backup now.
The 3-2-1 rule even better: backup at least one with a time delay, I. E. having it offline, not online mirroring! . This will rescue you in case of a ransomware attack. I have two physical backups wich I synchronise in an alternate way every 6 months only. So if may main or even first backup is „contaminated“, I can go back to a hopefully clean older backup (helps also to recover files which you did‘t want to delete).
Just to join the chorus with the people that already said (as you): everyone should have an offsite backup. Nobody want a robbery or a fire in their houses, but is a possibility. Myself, I only consider my data safe when it is in 3 different places: main storage, backup storage, and offsite location. If the main storage fails, I have the backup storage to rescue, and vice-versa. Offsite is for catastrophic hypothesis - hope never happpens, but things you could buy again, memories and work, no.
That synology is not enough. NOT enough. You need your date in three places. I have my data on an internal hard drive, an external hard drive, and another external hard drive that is stored off site. I swap the external on-site and off-site every week or so. The Synology is exactly how I lost my data and it cost me $2500 to recover from drive savers. Synology was an awful company and their customer support basically led me into making an error that cost me the data and required drivesavers and the $2500 fee. RAID is just a more robust form of storage with its redundancy but it still doesn't protect you from fire, theft, a total meltdown of the synology/raid system etc.
Well, I would not call myself a "Professional", but I have been computing since the late 70's, and you may have not listened to them thoroughly: When it comes to securing your data, it's key to have several backups in multiple locations (preferably far apart by at least 20 miles), like at trusted friends and families houses, high capacity hard drives in a bank vault... all encrypted of course, that cannot easily all be destroyed at the same time. Backing up to a single NAS, was insufficient in the first place, and you had more than just backups, but also data that was not on more than one device, and so the only copies, and those cannot be called a backups! For any data to be a backup, it needs to be on at least two separate drives bare minimum, or 2 computers in two well separated locations...
What a great video, everyone should know these fundamental storage principles. As a friend of mine often says, images aren’t stored unless they are in three places, with one of them off site ... A great choice with Synology, you deserve some decent luck !!
I felt your pain in this video. For seven years I've had a five-bay DAS (not a NAS) from what appears to be the same company as the one you show going up in flames. Aware that it had recently been in finanncial trouble (and I believe, now bankrupt) I’d had this feeling I was living on borrowed time. I had two additional backups so did feel OK but knew I needed a better and updated solution going forward, and I’m a hobbyist photographer. Long story short: I have recently moved to a Synology DS1522+ NAS. I still feel like I have tons to learn. Ironically, the old DAS I had been using as primary storage has now been reformatted and I’m using it as an additional backup…for as long as it keeps working. I think as has been said elsewhere: "3-2-1” is an important principle for storage and backup. Looks like you’re all sorted going forward.
So.... one day that $15k pain will disappear and you'll still have all the family photos. This story could have been worse! Might be hard to see that now, but that's the most important thing - thanks for sharing that. Will double check invoices from now on ha
Hi Andrew, this might be too late and maybe you tried that out but I'll share with everyone else just in case.. I recently had the issue with my Drobo 5D that wouldn't turn on. After some troubleshooting, I found out that the power supply block (external to the unit) was not providing any power. I found a generic version on Amazon and it worked. After that, I moved all the data to another solution and added redundancy to a separate location. I also got rid of the Drobo unit. Btw, the company went out of business a few months ago so you're not hurting anyone if you call it by name lol
I am very sorry to hear your loss. That is why I always advice every photographer to store their photos at 3 different harddrives/SSD which is of different types/brands to avoid faults if it is 3 devices of the same type. I never have my harddrives connected to my computer when I am on the internet.
Hi Andrew, thank you for this open story. It takes courage to be open about your own mistakes. Hope your new NAS is working out good for you. The synology NAS also has some back-up features build in for backing up to a external harddrive. Probably not enough to offload the whole 4 bay NAS but you could set it to have it back up your most valuable data. There are lot of options so look what works for you and keep in mind that in case of a fire everything on the same location may be destroyed, I like to bring a backup to my parents place for example but a lot of options are available. And yes, recovering data can be very expensive, essentially with high capacity HDD because high volume disk are build with a helium enclosure and can only be handled in very protective environments (when they need to be opened), and decryption handles a lot of computing power, but i can imagine the shock on receiving the bill. Hope you can enjoy your memories for a long time!
I will say I am sorry for your loss. I went through this in 2017. What I can say now with Synology is they’re forcing people to utilize their outrageously priced HAT5300 drives. Their 12tb offering is $450 vs wd and Seagates $200-250. Their proprietary drive pricing is appalling. It’s a huge reason I left Synology. So you’re telling me a bit of coding and a new sticker warrants 2x pricing? Purely not worth it and I’d never advise people to support that preposterous ask.
Thanks for sharing this story. -- Made the same mistake when I was a young boy collecting coins, and thought I could get a real bargain -- the friendly shop owner explained it to me, and although I was disappointed at the time, I never forgot this lesson. So I guess you have been extraordinary lucky until you made this mistake.
I'm dyslexic, so I can definitely relate. b's & d's, 6 & 9 are the worst. It's much worse when I'm extremely tired. Punctuation is extremely important, especially with long numbers.
If it's small enough write it to 100GB MData blu rays, so it can work with photos and old videos but not modern videos Might be tedious to get used to but it's bit perfect in the most adverse conditions and write-once...
I have 2 Synology and 1 Qnap. I do prefer Synology. If I were you I’d get another Synology and sync between the two in different locations. The functionality is built in.
And what happens when they stop supporting the drive? That’s what happened to me. G-drive wouldn’t mount on my new computer in my old one was fried! How long will they support the software that will mount your drive?
@@simon359 My Synology are from 2011 and 2019. Using Seagate hard and Samsung SSD drives. I never had an issue regarding support. I had one Samsung SSD failure though.
@@RadAlzyoud As I stated, this was G technology! They have a newer raids, but they don’t support their old ones. Something to think about next time you’re depending on your raid drives!
Oh thats brutal. You remind me of my brother. First time he had all the photos one ONE harddrive. It died, so had to send it to professional recover company. They found out that electronics is burned. So they bought somewhere the same HDD and somebody very skillfull rebuilt his HDD plates into this new HDD. They gave zero insurence it would work, but it did and it costed him equivalent of 1000 USD. We are in central Europe, in US it would be probably 3 or 5 times more :-) The second time he was more clever so he bought NAS system. But he tried to save on software and run it on Linux. He wanted to access some folder as an admin, messed up the command and rewrote the root folder with the new one with the same name :-) And off it went to the same company for manual index rebuild costing another 1000 USD :-D
Mate, like the song says" if I didn't have bad luck, I'de have no luck at all"! Very happy to see you didn't jump off a bridge. As we say here in Oz, and I'm sure other places, shit happens! I'm happy for you about getting your data back, even though so painfully. Good luck ( :-) ) in the future. Simon.
Definitely interested in the follow-up because backup services like Backblaze don’t backup NAS drives. I’d like to put another Synology drive at my in-laws but haven’t a clue how it works.
Will have to re-watch, but it's important to have an off-site backup as well -- online is a possibility, or rotate HDDs to an external location (which is difficult to keep track of and keep successfully up-to-date...)
Oh my goodness, so sorry to hear! Did you attempt negotiating with the recovery firm? Perhaps you could offer them free sponsorship for a period to get a rebate? My setup is local storage, which backs up to a RAID mirror and a USB drive using Carbon Copy Cloner, and also backs up to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive using Arq (with local encryption). And I still don't feel great about that because I don't test often enough 😭
Obviously gutted for you, people make mistakes and I'm sure if everyone did a video about their mistakes, RUclips would probably run out of data storage 🙂 I'm not in IT and Synology is a good turnkey solution that I nearly went for myself. I went to a more rugged solution, where I wasn't dependant on a companies hardware in the end. It took some learning for sure, but it was worth it overall. Good luck with the first part of your better solution 👍
Wow. That sucks. You gotta 3-2-1 baby. If you don't want to lose data, 3 copies on at least 2 different devices/media, with at least one of those copies at a different physical location. I know it seems expensive to do that, but, you know what's more expensive? What you experienced.
Sad news, but everything is relative. What's going on in Israel and Palestine, Ukraine and elsewhere is tragic, a disater. Losing all your images doesn't come close.
Raid isn't backup, it's redundancy. It will keep you going even if a drive fails. If you run a basic NAS without RAID you'd have to buy a new drive each time a failure occurs, and you'd have to restore data from a second drive before you can proceed. That's why you RAID, to not spend all that time waiting. But RAID still isn't a backup, you still need the data on other devices and locations as well.
Good advice. Aside from possible loss of the machine (fire, theft etc), as drives age, it's not uncommon for another drive in a set to fail while you're trying to rebuild after replacing a failed drive.
I use a NAS raid for backing up my Mac, but I also use nightly backup to Backblaze to store a copy of my data offsite. About 15 years ago I lost years worth of data when my NAS failed during a restore after my computer drive failed. Lesson learned.
The 3-2-1 Rule :
-3 copies of data
-On 2 different media
-With 1 copy being off-site
Except no one does this
@@PeterEsquire I do it, it's really not hard.
At home I have pictures local on computer, cloned to a NAS, and backed up to the cloud (specifically Adobe via Lightroom in this case). I'm honestly considering dropping the NAS as cloud backups are accessible from anywhere. I get home and copy pictures to both the PC which is set to auto-sync to the NAS and then upload to Lightroom. Just set and forget.
When traveling pictures are copied to laptop, an external drive, and kept on the SD card. When I leave the hotel room the external drive comes w/ me. Hotel room burns down? Still have my photos. Get mugged? Still have my photos. SD card fails? Still have my photos (except the new ones from that day... not much to do there unless the camera supports dual cards). At the end of the trip plug in the external drive and do the same import process to both local/NAS and Lightroom.
It's really just about establishing a procedure that becomes habit. It's not arduous if it's second nature and just the thing you do when you get home.
@@TruePoindexter It may not be hard, but it is expensive.
I do it, and it is so simple, e.g. either your older NAS which you used until 5 years ago and an external harddrive which you plug into your symbology NAS and run the automated incremental backup procedure. A matter of minutes.
@salocin I see you are a man of culture as well...
HI, I'm in IT, setting up NAS for a long time... just be careful , there is a difference with Mirror 2 NAS and Backup from 1 nas to another.... the mirror will replicate what you do, so if you delete a file, the delete will be replicated. a backup on the other hand, will keep an history ( that you define ) so you can go back in time. ALSO, on the synology, when you setup your file system to BTRFS ( hope you did ) , you can create snapshot of you volumes, this is useful for several situation like cryptoware. do your research , there is a lot of security that is helpful in your case
Thanks for the advice! That's helpful
people don't want to spend on backups until they hear price of data recovery. also, there is chant in IT repeat after me: RAID is NOT a backup. please do backups. raid will save in case of one or more (dependent on level) drive failure, but depending on raid system failing raid controller, memory corruption, unintentional/malicious deletion, ransomware, user error etc. raid will fail to protect you in most of these cases there are exceptions with certain systems like ZFS raids have snapshots so you can somewhat turn back time but still backup. Ideally 3-2-1 rule 3 copies of data on at least 2 different mediums and 1 offsite.
I told my wife a NAS was the best solution for a safe backup (+ an extra portable harddrive). When it arrived both included harddrives were broken out of the box. So yeah, that didn't give me a lot of peace of mind. In the end, I still have it, it has served me for 13 years now, although both drives are full and I'm using a big standalone HDD as main backup now.
The 3-2-1 rule even better: backup at least one with a time delay, I. E. having it offline, not online mirroring! . This will rescue you in case of a ransomware attack. I have two physical backups wich I synchronise in an alternate way every 6 months only. So if may main or even first backup is „contaminated“, I can go back to a hopefully clean older backup (helps also to recover files which you did‘t want to delete).
Just to join the chorus with the people that already said (as you): everyone should have an offsite backup. Nobody want a robbery or a fire in their houses, but is a possibility.
Myself, I only consider my data safe when it is in 3 different places: main storage, backup storage, and offsite location. If the main storage fails, I have the backup storage to rescue, and vice-versa. Offsite is for catastrophic hypothesis - hope never happpens, but things you could buy again, memories and work, no.
That synology is not enough. NOT enough. You need your date in three places. I have my data on an internal hard drive, an external hard drive, and another external hard drive that is stored off site. I swap the external on-site and off-site every week or so. The Synology is exactly how I lost my data and it cost me $2500 to recover from drive savers. Synology was an awful company and their customer support basically led me into making an error that cost me the data and required drivesavers and the $2500 fee. RAID is just a more robust form of storage with its redundancy but it still doesn't protect you from fire, theft, a total meltdown of the synology/raid system etc.
Yeah dude. I said that was only the start.
Well, I would not call myself a "Professional", but I have been computing since the late 70's, and you may have not listened to them thoroughly: When it comes to securing your data, it's key to have several backups in multiple locations (preferably far apart by at least 20 miles), like at trusted friends and families houses, high capacity hard drives in a bank vault... all encrypted of course, that cannot easily all be destroyed at the same time.
Backing up to a single NAS, was insufficient in the first place, and you had more than just backups, but also data that was not on more than one device, and so the only copies, and those cannot be called a backups! For any data to be a backup, it needs to be on at least two separate drives bare minimum, or 2 computers in two well separated locations...
What a great video, everyone should know these fundamental storage principles.
As a friend of mine often says, images aren’t stored unless they are in three places, with one of them off site ...
A great choice with Synology, you deserve some decent luck !!
I felt your pain in this video. For seven years I've had a five-bay DAS (not a NAS) from what appears to be the same company as the one you show going up in flames. Aware that it had recently been in finanncial trouble (and I believe, now bankrupt) I’d had this feeling I was living on borrowed time. I had two additional backups so did feel OK but knew I needed a better and updated solution going forward, and I’m a hobbyist photographer. Long story short: I have recently moved to a Synology DS1522+ NAS. I still feel like I have tons to learn. Ironically, the old DAS I had been using as primary storage has now been reformatted and I’m using it as an additional backup…for as long as it keeps working. I think as has been said elsewhere: "3-2-1” is an important principle for storage and backup. Looks like you’re all sorted going forward.
Good choice on the sleepy fish background music at the end
So.... one day that $15k pain will disappear and you'll still have all the family photos. This story could have been worse! Might be hard to see that now, but that's the most important thing - thanks for sharing that. Will double check invoices from now on ha
In IT we say Sh1t happens. Always plan for the worst case. As someone mentioned 3 copies. I prefer backup to cloud, a reputable cloud
Wow. This is such a difficult video to make. I can't imagine the heart sinking feeling
There are two kind of people. The ones who do backup and the ones which will do backup.
Hi Andrew, this might be too late and maybe you tried that out but I'll share with everyone else just in case.. I recently had the issue with my Drobo 5D that wouldn't turn on. After some troubleshooting, I found out that the power supply block (external to the unit) was not providing any power. I found a generic version on Amazon and it worked. After that, I moved all the data to another solution and added redundancy to a separate location. I also got rid of the Drobo unit. Btw, the company went out of business a few months ago so you're not hurting anyone if you call it by name lol
I am very sorry to hear your loss. That is why I always advice every photographer to store their photos at 3 different harddrives/SSD which is of different types/brands to avoid faults if it is 3 devices of the same type. I never have my harddrives connected to my computer when I am on the internet.
Hi Andrew, thank you for this open story. It takes courage to be open about your own mistakes. Hope your new NAS is working out good for you. The synology NAS also has some back-up features build in for backing up to a external harddrive. Probably not enough to offload the whole 4 bay NAS but you could set it to have it back up your most valuable data. There are lot of options so look what works for you and keep in mind that in case of a fire everything on the same location may be destroyed, I like to bring a backup to my parents place for example but a lot of options are available.
And yes, recovering data can be very expensive, essentially with high capacity HDD because high volume disk are build with a helium enclosure and can only be handled in very protective environments (when they need to be opened), and decryption handles a lot of computing power, but i can imagine the shock on receiving the bill. Hope you can enjoy your memories for a long time!
I will say I am sorry for your loss. I went through this in 2017.
What I can say now with Synology is they’re forcing people to utilize their outrageously priced HAT5300 drives. Their 12tb offering is $450 vs wd and Seagates $200-250. Their proprietary drive pricing is appalling.
It’s a huge reason I left Synology.
So you’re telling me a bit of coding and a new sticker warrants 2x pricing? Purely not worth it and I’d never advise people to support that preposterous ask.
Life was so simple when we had the old photo album.
Thanks for sharing this story. -- Made the same mistake when I was a young boy collecting coins, and thought I could get a real bargain -- the friendly shop owner explained it to me, and although I was disappointed at the time, I never forgot this lesson. So I guess you have been extraordinary lucky until you made this mistake.
Your character seems to be coming out more in these videos, not just camera and lens reviews. Loved this video! 👍🏽
I'm dyslexic, so I can definitely relate. b's & d's, 6 & 9 are the worst. It's much worse when I'm extremely tired. Punctuation is extremely important, especially with long numbers.
if it is that important I suggest invest in LTO tape storage for redundancy
Sorry for your loss.
If it's small enough write it to 100GB MData blu rays, so it can work with photos and old videos but not modern videos Might be tedious to get used to but it's bit perfect in the most adverse conditions and write-once...
I have 2 Synology and 1 Qnap. I do prefer Synology.
If I were you I’d get another Synology and sync between the two in different locations. The functionality is built in.
And what happens when they stop supporting the drive? That’s what happened to me. G-drive wouldn’t mount on my new computer in my old one was fried!
How long will they support the software that will mount your drive?
@@simon359 My Synology are from 2011 and 2019. Using Seagate hard and Samsung SSD drives. I never had an issue regarding support. I had one Samsung SSD failure though.
@@RadAlzyoud
As I stated, this was G technology! They have a newer raids, but they don’t support their old ones. Something to think about next time you’re depending on your raid drives!
Ouch.... I don't know what else to say! Time is the best healer.
Oh thats brutal. You remind me of my brother. First time he had all the photos one ONE harddrive. It died, so had to send it to professional recover company. They found out that electronics is burned. So they bought somewhere the same HDD and somebody very skillfull rebuilt his HDD plates into this new HDD. They gave zero insurence it would work, but it did and it costed him equivalent of 1000 USD. We are in central Europe, in US it would be probably 3 or 5 times more :-) The second time he was more clever so he bought NAS system. But he tried to save on software and run it on Linux. He wanted to access some folder as an admin, messed up the command and rewrote the root folder with the new one with the same name :-) And off it went to the same company for manual index rebuild costing another 1000 USD :-D
Mate, like the song says" if I didn't have bad luck, I'de have no luck at all"! Very happy to see you didn't jump off a bridge. As we say here in Oz, and I'm sure other places, shit happens! I'm happy for you about getting your data back, even though so painfully. Good luck ( :-) ) in the future. Simon.
Wow! I’m glad you got your data back. A lot of people don’t get that chance.
Definitely interested in the follow-up because backup services like Backblaze don’t backup NAS drives. I’d like to put another Synology drive at my in-laws but haven’t a clue how it works.
God damn, that's rough. I sympathize, as someone with ADHD who has had to incur costs due to forgetfulness or poor focus.
i knew the company right off. so so sorry for your loss.
Will have to re-watch, but it's important to have an off-site backup as well -- online is a possibility, or rotate HDDs to an external location (which is difficult to keep track of and keep successfully up-to-date...)
Comedy = Tragedy + Time. Hope you can laugh about it in 10 years.
Maybe 15 ($1000 for each year) ;)
Oh my goodness, so sorry to hear! Did you attempt negotiating with the recovery firm? Perhaps you could offer them free sponsorship for a period to get a rebate?
My setup is local storage, which backs up to a RAID mirror and a USB drive using Carbon Copy Cloner, and also backs up to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive using Arq (with local encryption). And I still don't feel great about that because I don't test often enough 😭
I definitely attempted to negotiate
AAAAARGH!!! My nightmare for sure
First lesson Andrew, NEVER encrypt your data! Ah, is the only lesson you need.
Obviously gutted for you, people make mistakes and I'm sure if everyone did a video about their mistakes, RUclips would probably run out of data storage 🙂
I'm not in IT and Synology is a good turnkey solution that I nearly went for myself. I went to a more rugged solution, where I wasn't dependant on a companies hardware in the end. It took some learning for sure, but it was worth it overall. Good luck with the first part of your better solution 👍
Did you try turning it off and back on again? (10/10 IT Crowd clip usage)
I was thinking you'd comment on the despecialized clip. ;)
Good choice with Synology ;) still remember 3-2-1 rule ;)
The background music is way too loud. Fail.
Raid is not a Backup
Wow. That sucks. You gotta 3-2-1 baby. If you don't want to lose data, 3 copies on at least 2 different devices/media, with at least one of those copies at a different physical location. I know it seems expensive to do that, but, you know what's more expensive? What you experienced.
Why not on Cloud?
hopefully you didn't have a WD... had an old NAS from them, LOL lost everything, had a vulnerability they never fixed.
I hope (and guess from you buying a new NAS) that you've recovered financially.
Sad news, but everything is relative. What's going on in Israel and Palestine, Ukraine and elsewhere is tragic, a disater. Losing all your images doesn't come close.
Me at 9:52: 🤮