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Comment by a_gnostic | Hacker News Reader

> Both Google and Microsoft, leading providers in this space, have announced the discontinuation of their unlimited storage plans.

> Additionally, it’s essential to note that cloud drives, which are primarily sync services, do not offer comprehensive data protection.

There is no cloud. It's just other people's computers, and they don't care about your data except the parts useful to them.

Time to fire up the old RAID.

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Or just the toaster dock and some bare drives.

That's what I do. + another one like it offsite. With software RAID (Windows Storage Spaces).

I have one as well, using btrfs+RAID1.

Obligatory RAID is not a backup.

3-2-1 is a backup strategy.

Parity RAID disk setups have lost me more data then encrypted drives over the years. They seem to lead to eventual corruption and data loss, way earlier than straight doing nothing.

Counter: RAID is the backup between your other backups. A backup is, in the end, anything you turn to when you have some kind of failure. Which is appropriate depends on the type of failure. RAID is there for your hardware failures; "tape style" (how does one phrase this?) is there for your data deletion. (One could argue that a missing tine of the trident would be checksums, for data corruption)

Example: A small company with data they find important but it isn't a great volume and they don't have a huge budget. They do a backup of everything once every week or month (it doesn't matter).

Should a drive fail, the backups could be handy, but who wants to lose days of work? And so people turn to RAID.

Note that as your strategy/need evolves toward continual backups, backup and RAID begin to merge, expensively.

No, RAID is just hardware redundancy. Backups cover more than just hardware failures, they also defend against accidental deletion, data corruption caused by an application or system error, and ransomware attacks.

Hot take: I’d rather buy another set of disks than use raid (0). And have manual backup.

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