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I generally council that this is something of a value judgement and there's no "one size fits all" solution. What to do depends on the risks to be mitigated, the budget available and how important maximising available storage is.
As discussed by others, RAID isn't backup - it avails continued access to data in the event of a HDD failure (they all die in the end) at the the price of less storage for the money. But it doesn't mitigate accidental deletion, malware, theft, failure of the host device, etc. etc. For a business, continued data access is crucial so we use RAID, but for a home movie tank (where you have the original media) one might prefer to maximise available storage.
"Backup" generally means making a duplicate "somewhere else." How often to make such a backup, how long to retain them and where to keep them (onsite, offsite, both,) is another value judgement again base on the risks to be mitigated and cost. As explored previously, backing up critical data to an cloud solution mitigates lots of risks for the local environment (flood, theft, host failure, etc.) but can take a while to run (especially the first one) and can take an age to restore. (BTW, don't forget most SOHO ISP packages have much lower upload rates then download.)
And as we often opine in these columns, very many people (and way too many businesses) never test out restoring from their backups - the time to find out your backups don't work is not the day you've deleted the wedding video or the household budget spreadsheet.
Of course, there's plenty of scope to mix and match solutions, especially if you are a bit creative about how you organise the data. For example, all the DVD/BD rips - you have the originals on platter and loosing them isn't the end of the world, so don't bother backing them up and maximise your storage. Elsewhere, your word docs and spreadsheet are critical and irreplaceable, (and relatively small) so maybe backup that share to a cloud storage solution - many ISP's now offer you a fair wodge of cloud storage for free.
And the more you can automate the better - backing up data is a miserably boring task and really easy to find an excuse to not do it. Even if you automate, you still need to check it's happened from time to time (and ideally test restoring something.) |
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