Backup and archive hardware and regimes

[justinhill]

Last night, one of my hard drives went down. It was an old spinner, used for backups. As well as fixing this problem I thought I should re-consider the whole backup regime, and see what others feel about it all. My present setup is an eclectic jumble of variously-sized and housed hard drives with stuff all over them.

My thinking is that I need one backup for the (500GB) computer SSD, and one backup for the (1TB) audio SSD. The audio drive contains only 'live' projects so I also need somewhere to archive completed projects. This 'archive' drive should itself be backed up - i.e. there should be two copies of it.

The backups of the computer and current audio should just be 'clones' I guess, but bigger than the actual SSDs so that Carbon Copy Cloner can do its Safety Net thing.

The archive drive and its mirror would be the same size as each other, and no safety net required because nothing would ever be deleted. This also means these drives should be as big as I can afford.

Does everyone agree with me so far?

I'm not sure I can afford to do all this with SSDs (much as I'd like to) but last night's drive crash has left me feeling a bit fed up with spinners. There's also the question of whether each 'destination' must necessarily be a unique physical drive. This would have to be the case with the archive pair or there's no point in doing it - but maybe the computer and current audio could be backed up to one drive with two partitions, or even one partition with CCC's backup to folder feature.

If I go with spinners, there's also the question of enclosures. I don't like the drive enclosures I have at the moment (OWC) because they've always had a habit of not mounting after a restart. However, buying good-brand external systems like G-Tech looks a bit pricey for me.

And then there's RAID...

So, bearing in mind the obvious problem - money - does anyone have any thoughts to steer my thinking?