Quote:
Originally Posted by Burninator
I think I will buy two 1 or 1.5 TB hard drives, RAID 1 them and put all my media on them (movies, music and pictures). This will give me hard drive redundancy and some piece of mind. It will also save me the money of buying something like a NAS or Drobo.
Then I think I will try a trial of the online backup sites for the data that cannot be replaced. In terms of file size the irreplaceable data is significantly smaller than my whole music and DVD library ripped onto my computer is, so it shouldn't take a long time to put everything on there. But I suppose it also allows me to backup everything else if I decide to as well. I'll have to put more thought into the online backup and see if it is worth it or not.
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Very sensible approach.
I am going to make a suggestion though:
Think about RAID-1 in terms of availability, not redundancy. Two 1.5 TB drives in a RAID-1 will protect against drive failure, ensuring your data remains available, but not file system corruption (and the chances of that are greater with software RAID-1), meaning your setup is not redundant.
What I would do is use one 1.5TB drive as your data drive. The second 1.5 TB drive, you use to keep an up to date clone of your data on the first drive. On the Mac, you could use Time Machine, on the PC, you could use something like Acronis. Either way, find a solution that will do it on a regular schedule for you - maybe daily, maybe weekly if the data on the 1.5 TB drive doesn't change very often. For a large iTunes or other multimedia library, I find weekly is fine - I don't add or change much stuff on a daily basis.
This way, if your primary drive dies, you are only down for as long as it takes you to replace the drive, and copy the data from your backup drive. If the file system corrupts, you just re-format and copy the data back. Either way, the second copy of the data is now impervious to both file system corruption and mechanical drive failure. The only cost, from your perspective is if the primary drive dies, you are offline for a little while while you restore. For a home scenario, this is hardly the end of the world.