Using internal storage for backup

- [Instructor] Internal storage is a great option for running backups. Whether you're using Windows Server Backup or any third party backup as well. And there's several advantages that you can use as well as some disadvantages. Let's take a look at some of those options. First off, we have an internal hard drive. You can add an internal hard drive into your backup server just as the same hard drive you used for installing your operating system. You also can set up an internal RAID volume. Now there's a couple of different types of RAID volumes you can do. There is RAID one, which is mirroring. There's RAID five, RAID six, and there's others as well. But as far as RAID goes, for software RAID, you're a little bit limited with the types of RAID you can do with Windows Server which I'll talk about in a little bit. And there's different types of hard drives. There are SATA drives, eSATA which would be an attachable drive similar to a USB drive, as well as SAS drive. SAS drives are a little bit faster but not quite as fast as say SSD drives would be. And SSD of course, is another way you could go. As well as hard disk drives, and hard disk drives can be SATA or SAS. And those speeds can go anywhere from 7,200 rpm up to about 15,000 rpm. Then you have NVMe. Those kind of look like a RAM stick, but really it's a type of hard drive that you can install into your laptop, into your desktop, as well as into your server. And the prices for NVMEs are coming down and they're very fast. And then of course, you can go with good old USB. Which will allow you to attach a drive externally say through a USB port. Now you want to go with the USB 3.0, and there's multiple different versions of USB 3.0. Because those are going to be much faster than USB 2.0. And of course, USB 1.0 hasn't been used in quite a while. Now when you use your hard drives, you need to create what's called a volume, and that's where you take multiple hard drives and you create a volume from that. And you can either use hardware RAID, or you can use Software RAID. Now if you're using Windows software RAID it's going to be slower and there's not as many options. You do have the option to create one large volume from multiple different types of discs. You could create RAID 1 mirror or RAID 5 parody drives, and those allow for high availability in case one of your drives fails. Now hardware rate is going to be better, because it's going to be from a card, but it is going to add some expense. But you do get a lot more options. You can also set up hard drives that can be used in case of a failover. So if one of your internal drives, say from a RAID 5 or RAID 6 go bad, it will automatically use an additional drive. It's called RAID 5E or RAID 6E, and there's other versions of it as well. Now, you can also use RAID 10 and RAID 50 on certain hardware RAID cards. In Windows, we create what's called a pool, a virtual drive from a pool of drives, and we can create one larger drive that if you use the parody option for example, can be highly available in case one of those drives fails. In the Linux world, you can add mounted volumes in Linux. So what you can do is add additional hard drives in multiple different ways, and you can do a similar thing that you can do in Windows. You can create RAID, you can create single volumes, whatever it is that works best for you. But they do need to be mounted in Linux in order to be recognized. There's several advantages to using internal storage, such as it's a faster connection when you're doing backups. So if you're using an external USB as opposed to an internal USB, there are internal USB ports on some motherboards, then your internal one is going to be faster than your external. And if you choose an NVMe for instance then you're going to have the fastest type of connection for internal storage. Another advantage for using internal storage is it's going to be less expensive. For example, for external drives you're going to need to have a drive enclosure. If you're using the SAN, storage area network that's going to be an expense. But if you're just plugging, say SATA drives or SSD drives directly to your motherboard, of course that's going to be much less expensive and it's going to give you fast access as well. Now a disadvantage would be that if you run out of space for your drives, where are you going to put them? So you have to go with external drives and you can't easily remove the drives. So if you wanted to rotate drives in and out of your server for internal storage then that becomes an additional challenge. Some ways to get around that would be to use deduplication. Now, deduplication says that if you have multiple files that are the exact same name, the exact same size, then it will go ahead and just back up the file once. And that can save you a lot of backup storage and it's offered by many third party backup solutions. It backs up only one copy of a file that it finds duplicates of, and it creates pointers from files that may be in other locations. So if it has that same file in multiple different locations then it's going to create a pointer to where that location is rather than just copying over the file. And it works similar to deduplication in Windows server as well as Linux, which does the same thing. It just keeps a copy of the one file and then it puts pointers to all these other locations. Internal storage does allow for simple setup to access fast internal drives for any server backup.