Doctor Glyndwr wrote:
RAID also won't help against accidental deletion, or data corruption, or ransomware encryption, or any number of other mishaps. As you wisely say, RAID Ain't A Backup. But discs are cheap and I'd rather guard against the most common source of data loss -- drive failure -- via RAID than have to schlep tons of stuff back from cloud storage.
I suppose it depends where your own comfort level is with the security of your data based on its importance to you.
For example a music or film collection might be considered non-critical but you'd still rather not lose them, whereas cherished family photos and videos may well be considered vitally important.
Personally I run with two 'live' copies of my data and one 'offline' copy of my data.
The master 'live' copy lives in my own PC on a 2TB drive. (This is what propagates out to everything else when I run my Goodsync backups.)
The secondary 'live' copy lives on the 2TB NAS (two 1TB drives in spanning mode). This also serves it back out to the network as it has films, music, family photos and videos on it etc, so anyone can access it from any PC on the network. (There's also a private share on there where I put my own stuff, and Mrs Hearthly has a 50GB quota-ed share on there which she dumps pics and videos from her phone to, for me to assimilate into the main master family collection on my PC, which in turn propagates back out to everything else when I run my backups.)
The third 'offline' copy lives on a basic external 2TB hard drive connected to my PC that I only plug in when I'm doing a backup, then it gets unplugged again. (The idea being that day-to-day it's inaccessible, incorruptible, immune to any kind of horrible ransomware etc, so in the event of a catastrophic failure of some sort, that's my recovery drive. I suppose for maximum security I should keep it in a different property inbetween backups so it becomes a genuine offsite backup.)
My current issue is that I'm nudging up against the 2TB limits, hence having to shop around for new storage solutions.
I may just replicate what I have now, but up everything to 4TB. (4TB internal drive, 2x4TB NAS, 4TB external drive - and run the NAS in RAID-1 to give extra protection against what is indeed the most common source of data loss, drive failure.)
Maybe one day I'll cave and just lob everything up to THE SINISTER CLOUD.