datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
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RAID helps protect you from certain failures, and also allows you to add more storage inexpensively. Typically buying multiple small drives is cheaper than one larger drive, but you do have to buy at least one extra drive for failure.
You do need to plan for backups. RAID is not a backup, it doesn't protect you from fires, computer failure, or accidentally deleting things. So a backup is necessary. Look into 3-2-1 backup solutions. At least 3 copies of your data, 2 different hardware types (like SSD and HDD), with at least 1 offsite copy.
People often keep their NAS at home, with a cloud storage provider as an offsite backup, and an external drive for local backup.
If you have the money, and a family or friend with space, you can buy multiple complete NAS solutions and back them up to each other.