| A buddy of mine and I traded 1TB RAID5 NAS's and run a private VPN. Data is mirrored locally and offsite (out of state) nightly.
At least with me, I had to build a mechanism that happened automatically, with no input from me once it was setup. Because, based on experience, a process is great, but there's going to be a day that you get lazy and don't do it, and that will be the day you need it.
In terms of cost per megabyte, it's hard to beat Winchester style drives, but the failure rate is ridiculous, and despite S.M.A.R.T. technology they fail without warning. Therefore I went with redundancy in layers. A RAID5 is more than a couple of big drives, but it also means a drive failure is an annoyance rather than an emergency. And constant automated offsite backups give a peace of mind that is priceless. Unless something takes out a 100 mile radius, once it's on my network share, the most I lose is 24 hours worth of data (because it didn't have time to sync). |