Totally. If you enjoy the config and have the time, by all means.
If you just want it to work, by a Synology. Mine has been running strong for several years now and has docker images for my unify controller, pi hole and Plex. Took minimal time to setup and none since that day. Love it
Edit:
And my encrypted cloud backup in Backblaze B2 was equally as easy to setup and costs a whopping $2 a month for every family pic, video and doc.
I have triple backup, with mirrored RAID for one of those. No effort, maximum peace of mind.
Redundancy and backup are not the same thing. RAID gets you redundancy but if you get pwnd, you get redundantly pwnd!
So you backup to elsewhere. Now you have two copies of your data. Cool. Now you probably can recover from a silly mistake from up to a week ago or whatever your retention period is. However, if you don't monitor your backups, you'll never notice certain snags such as ransomware. OK, that might be low risk for your home backups.
It's quite hard to get the balance right but I think that you might not be quite as protected as you think you are. Why not buy a cheap hard disk and clone all your data to it every three or six months and stash it somewhere?
I have a similar argument with a colleague of mine, to the point that I will probably buy a LTO multi head unit myself and some tapes.
RAID is not a backup, its a data integrity thing. It ensures that what you save now stays saved correctly into the future. It protects now. Backups protect the past.
Think long and hard about what might go wrong and take suitable steps. For you I think a simple, regular off line back up will work out quite well with minimal cost, for disaster recovery.
I didn’t actually specify it out, but my third backup is an offline SSD that I plug in every once in a while and store at my office. I only mentioned the RAID for local redundancy reasons.
You are right about the data being corrupted, either maliciously or bitrot. The NAS is not accessible outside my home network, so I think I am ok there.
Bitrot would require snapshots and full backups stored over time, which I could do fairly easily but I am currently not.
My Synology DS918+ ran for years without an issue.
Then suddenly I woke up and I had the blinking blue light of death, it starts but won't boot. It could be anything from the BIOS battery going dead to parts not being soldered properly.
The only way I could get data off their proprietary SHR system (which is great, except when the HW breaks) would've been to buy a new Synology system, put the drives there and pray it works out of the box.
At that point I decided to move out of a NAS appliance and build one myself, based on Unraid. Now I've got the same 1 drive redundancy BUT every file exists on exactly one drive, that drive has a bog-standard XFS filesystem. So if the HW breaks I can just take the drive(s) out and use them in a cheap USB dock.
The Synology's issue turned out to be a bad PSU - the light turned on but for some reason it didn't provide enough power for the system to POST. I grabbed a 3rd party one off Amazon and now it's running offsite backups for the Unraid system :)
> The only way I could get data off their proprietary SHR system (which is great, except when the HW breaks) would've been to buy a new Synology system, put the drives there and pray it works out of the box.
If you just want it to work, by a Synology. Mine has been running strong for several years now and has docker images for my unify controller, pi hole and Plex. Took minimal time to setup and none since that day. Love it
Edit: And my encrypted cloud backup in Backblaze B2 was equally as easy to setup and costs a whopping $2 a month for every family pic, video and doc.
I have triple backup, with mirrored RAID for one of those. No effort, maximum peace of mind.