Comment on Adding storage - Best options? (External USB drives, automatic decryption, media, etc.)

seaQueue@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Buy external drives. Don’t run them in RAID, use one to store backups and plug it in once or twice a week to copy data to it.

The secret to RAID is that it doesn’t buy you data protection, it buys you uptime to access data while a device in the array is failed. This is most valuable to businesses that can’t afford the downtime that recovery from a backup incurs. The most paranoid RAID will still fail sooner or later, due to hardware or software failure, and as a home user with a limited budget you’re far better off having one offline backup that you can use to recover data from once that happens.

Backup only data you can’t afford to lose (eg: don’t backup downloaded data that can be replaced easily, like a game or movie collection) and your backups will be much more manageably sized and you won’t need to spend as much on your backup drive. If a backup disk is too much for your budget you can always exploit cloud backup plans, backblaze PC backup has no limit on the size of your backups and only charges something like ~$60/yr.

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