One of the challenges that I’ve had with my 12TB WD Sentinel DX 4000 is how to go about backing it up. You see Microsoft only designed the inbuilt backup utility to handle up to 2TB of space, yet my WD Sentinel has 8.12TB of data storage capacity as you can see below.
Likewise, as you can see, I have almost filled it with lots of data, so losing something could be a real problem for me.
The solution I’m using is actually quite simple. I’ve attached 2 x WD MyBook 3TB drives to the external USB 3 ports. I’ve then installed BackupAssist and am using it to do the backup of selected folders to the drives. I’ve split my backups so that half the folders will go to one drive and the other half will go to the other drive. BackupAssist gives me the chance to use the many different methods to backup my data, but I’ve found that the File Replication engine is the best for this type of backup.
What this backup does is protect my data, should I have some major corruption of the RAID array, or in case of fire (I take the 3TB Mybook drives offsite and swap them regularly). In the event that the unit is destroyed in some way, I’d get a new unit and restore just the data to it. I’ve tested this and it works just fine 
No more 2TB backup limit!
After each nightly backup, you have the option of having a status report emailed to you. One of the parts I like about this is the Media Usage Report which shows just how much space is free/used on your destination media.
If you are interested in BackupAssist you can check out their website here
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