I have a 2 bay NAS, and I was planning on using 2x 18tb HDDs in raid 1. I was planning on purchasing 3 of these drives so when one fails I have the replacement. (I am aware that you should purchase at different times to reduce risk of them all failing at the same time)

Then I setup restic.

It makes backups so easy that I am wondering if I should even bother with raid.

Currently I have ~1TB of backups, and with restics snapshots, it won’t grow to be that big anyways.

Either way, I will be storing the backups in aws S3. So is it still worth it to use raid? (I also will be storing backups at my parents)

  • Andres Salomon@social.ridetrans.it
    1·
    5 hours ago

    @Atemu Well yes, this is experience of self-hosting for close to 25 years, with a mix of drives over those years. I have noticed much better quality drives in the past decade (helium hdds running cooler/longer, nvram, etc) with declining failure rates and less corruption.

    But especially if you’re talking about longer time scales like that (“every few decades”), it’s difficult to account for technology changes.

    • Andres Salomon@social.ridetrans.it
      1·
      5 hours ago

      @Atemu Drives from the mid/late-2000s in particular were just poorly behaved for me. Recent drives (2014+) have been much better. Who knows how 2030s drives will behave? So I will continue scrubbing data as I swap out older drives for newer ones.