I know very little about all of this. But I’ve been toying with the idea of backing up my data for a while now.
Currently I just have 4 drives in my PC (3 M.2s & 1 2.5in SSDs. Total of ~9tb total capacity. Only using ~4tb atm)
I’d like to keep it as simple & cheap as possible. For now, I only want one local backup with capacity of at least 8tb. I don’t feel like multiple and or off-site backups is necessary for me personally.
So far I’m just looking at getting a cheap HDD docking station. But I don’t know how reliable that would be. Or if there’s a better solution that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.
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If I came and took your PC away, not counting price of the components, what monetary value would you put on the stolen data? By value I mean to you personally.
I use a very barebones solution in Linux to backup every 2 or 3 weeks my 14Tb of media. I use only as cold backup, to prevent brainfart data losses mainly. I only turn on the disks when I will start a backup and run a very basic rsync command, they stay 90%+ of time turned off.
I have 2 external USB3 HDs (8+10), in ext4 format. Then I use the ‘poor man raid’ MergerFS to fuse both in a unique directory.
MergerFS is a odd duck in the system files, it only ‘binds’ two files systems at directory level, you can see the individual files in one disk or the other even with the filesystem is mounted. No redundancy, no parallel read, but it trys balance the files between drivers.
But WHEN my internal data became bigger than my backup I only need add another driver, change a script command line and have more capacity without the dangers of a RAID rebuild. Or size consistency issues. If you lost a disk you WILL lost data, but is easy peaky change the faulty disk and start again without lost ALL data, a real danger when you need rebuilt a RAID.
It’s slow but rock solid, I use it in my internal mass media disks too. I even migrated the disks (with all data) between two machines, without problems.
By the way, my main system/game disks are two 1Tb M2 in RAID0, for performance, it’s a different need.