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Backup Strategy follow-up

With my Backup-Nas, and other small changes the backup strategy changed a little.

These are my previous posts for reference:

With my previous strategy I had one incident, which led me to download around 4 TB of movies again. Which took some time and some movies my system could hardly find. That is why I decided that with the newly built Backup-Nas, I would also back up all my media.

Therefore, I decided to improve my storage in two steps:

  1. Put the media on a ZFS RAIDZ11 Pool, so that I can also benefit from the self-healing abilities of ZFS
  2. Backup everything on the Backup-Nas, also on RAIDZ1.

Improvement 1 - RAIDZ1

For that to be power efficient I invested in 3 18 TB drives, which leaves me with about 33 TB of usable space in a RADIZ1 array. They consume about 5 W each in standby, wich was acceptable. All the other drives I would use for the Backup-Nas media pool.

Improvement 2 - Backup

Unfortunately I needed lots of small drives to match the big capacity of the media pool of my Main-Nas. So I asked around and finally filled up my Backup-Nas with a lot of old 4 and 3 TB drives. In the end I had the following pools ready:

  • Pool 1 = (4 * 4 TB in RAIDZ1) + (5 * 3 TB in RAIDZ1)
  • Pool 2 = 2 * 10 TB in a mirror

In total about 32 TB.

Like that I was able to hit approximately the same capacity as my Main-Nas for the media. It does consume some power, but it is only running about 2 times an hour a week to synchronize.

The rest of the backup strategy I didn’t change.


  1. RAID-Level Summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS