Hi, currently I have a almost none backups and I want to change them. I have a PC with Nextcloud on 500gb ssd that I also use for gaming (1tb system drive). Nextcloud would be used to store/sync images, documents, contacts, and calendar from my phone and laptop. I also have an old pc that has 2x 80gb, 120gb, 320gb, and 500gb hdd. I want to use it for other backups like OS snapshots, programming projects, etc. but its not a big hdd but a lot of small hdds. Should I store each backup on 2 drives? Can I automate this? Any suggestions would be helpful.
One thing that RAID doesn’t do is verify the integrity of your data on read. In other words: if you have silent data corruption somewhere you won’t notice.
For many use cases that’s acceptable, since it doesn’t handle often, but personally I don’t like it for any kind or achival/backups. That’s why I picked ZFS, which stores and verifies checksums even on non-mirrored/non-raid storage. I’ve added RaidZ2 (similar to RAID 5 with 2 parity disks) on top of it to be able to recover from checksum errors.