I back up important stuff locally and in the cloud (just Google Drive at the moment).

Everything else I just cross my fingers and hope that no more than 1 drive goes out at a time

I only run one array/nas currently and the second nas is currently between builds and is half the size of the main array. I am do a lot of hardware salvaging. So I have a lot of missmatched drives. What i have done is organised the datasets by type, and below that by importance. This allows me to do a backup of the data I care most about. So, using all of these old hard drives, I find ones that have performance characteristics that are very similar, and make mirrors and raidz1 triples. I then cold store these with different people.

I do 4-1-1.

Two full external USB external hard drive backups at home (using a multi-drive USB case of course), ping-ponged so that if an accidentally deleted file is also deleted on the most recent backup, I can go to the previous backup.

A third full external USB external hard drive back-up off-site that gets rotated periodically into the home backups.

So I don’t believe in “two different types of media”. My opinion is that was coined back in the day when it was assumed tape would be the primary backup. The days of tape for home-sized NAS’s are over, as of 2010 when hard drives briefly became cheaper than even blank tapes. (Then the Thailand monsoon hit in 2011 and the prices spiked, but now prices are comparatively low again).

I have about 45 tb worth of data, mainly movies, tv shows, and roms. I have an unraid server that I use for daily use. The Unraid server has a single parity disk in the event of disk failure. For redundancy I also use external hard drives for cold local storage, they get updated about once a month. Lastly I have a friend who lives in another town whom I have all my data backed up with, and I backup his data as well. We backup each other’s data around twice a year. Lastly I have about 20 gigs of data which I really don’t want to lose, I have this data backed up to the cloud as well.

With that being said to me it is just a matter of how important you think the data is, and what you feel comfortable spending to make sure you keep it. For me I’ve been data hoarding for about the last 10 years, so to me this is 10 years worth of work, and I’d rather not lose it.

To answer your first question about raid, I don’t consider it enough to satisfy the part 2 rule. For my server I bought all my hard drives at the same time. That means if they were a bad batch of hard drives they might all fail one after another. Even if I got a good batch, they are all getting used at about the same rate, so they will likely age at about the same rate. If one of the hard drives dies, the others are likely not far behind, and the stress of rebuilding the array might kill off the rest.

As to your second question, I try to limit how much I have stored on the cloud. For me it makes much more sense, if you want to have a third copy of your data, to buy an external hard drive and give it to a friend to hold onto.

I have a backup NAS as my primary backup copy and uploading the most important data to the Backblaze. This simple setup works perfectly for me.

u/symean, a RAID (or NAS for that matter) system is NOT a backup solution and should never be considered as one.

With regard to your backup solution, you should then look into implementing a 3-2-1 backup model. One of the many example Videos for BackUps:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB4kwfY2w7A

Having that said, what your BackUp model should be, ie. Full, Differencial, Incremantal, etc, will depend on your budget, storage capacity and end goals.

With regards to Backups best practices, see (for example) the following video (of the many, many other ones that find in youtube as well):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0KZ5iXTkzg

Best Regards