I’m thinking of backing all of my family’s digital assets up. It includes less than 4 TB of information. Most are redundant video files that are in old encodings or not encoded at all and there are a lot of duplicate images and old documents. I’m gonna clean this stuff up with a bash script and some good old manual review, but first I need to do some pre-planning.
- What’s the cheapest and most flexible NAS I can make from eBay or local? What kind of processors and what motherboard features?
- What separate guides should I follow to source the drives? What RAID?
- What backup style should I follow? How many cold copies? How do I even handle the event of a fire?
I intend to do some of this research on my own since no one answer is fully representative but am appreciative of any leads.
The 2 isn’t two offline, it’s two forms of media. Hard drive, optical, tape, etc., in case there’s some defect or disaster that renders one unusable. The offsite one should probably be offline, but unless you’re really paranoid, a cloud backup counts as one for each category. (But it needs to be a managed cloud backup, not just a copy in Google drive, because you want to be protected against accidental deletions.)
I see, thanks for clearing that up. In my situation, keeping a few terabytes on 3 hard drives and backing up to a reliable cloud copy (not sync, as you mentioned) is good enough for me. Optical media is impractical with the amount of data, and tape drives far too expensive for just a few TBs.