Looking for new starage / HDD

[Ringside]

I recently saw an 8TB Seagate desktop drive for a very decent price, I currently have shit scattered over half a dozen or so internal and external drives, and I quite like the idea of getting everything sorted in one place.

However the notion of having everything in one place has always terrified me, if the drive fails....everything has gone, rather than just my films drive, or my mp3's one etc.

What is the general opinion on this? Anyone have any other good solutions?

[Shit Good Nose]

It's a solution, but whether it's good...

I basically have a backup drive which only gets used to put copies of stuff on, or to get them back if the main drive they are on has failed.

"But what if that drive fails?"  Hence arguable whether or not it's a good solution...

What else...

Cloud?
SSDs?
Pay someone to have it on their network?

[Ringside]

Yeah my drives only really get used for a few minutes when I'm dumping stuff on them from my downloads drive, or again when I'm getting something off again.

I really wish large SSD storage was as cheap as ye olde spinning drives. It's definitely getting better though.

[Shit Good Nose]

My manager has his backed up on a third party network, but most of it is home projects related to his job, the rest is personal stuff like financial information.  I don't know if anyone would take issue to you[nb]us[/nb] wanting to store their illegally downloaded films, music, computer games, and porn.

[Twed]

"But what if that drive fails?"  Hence arguable whether or not it's a good solution...

That's why people use redundant RAID levels. A common setup is to have four drives, two of which can fail and be replaced before the data is lost.

Amazon Cloud Drive is a popular off-site backup solution these days. Just encrypt everything in the upload process and they can't look at your stuff.

[Ringside]

I've been aware of RAID for years but have never toyed with it.

[Benjaminos]

As a sysadmin, I am obligated to point out that RAID is not a backup.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

It will get rid of the spiders in your computer though.

[Twed]

As a sysadmin, I am obligated to point out that RAID is not a backup.

Agreed. I definitely made it sound like it was. RAID for redundancy + rotating snapshots (or JUST the rotating snapshots) is a better setup.

[momatt]

However the notion of having everything in one place has always terrified me, if the drive fails....everything has gone, rather than just my films drive, or my mp3's one etc.

Buy two you wally.