[jpeloquin]

I was in the same place 6 or 7 years ago. Due to indecision, I ended up using btrfs, zfs, and mdadm (technically, Synology hybrid raid) on various devices. They all work, more or less.

Looking back, the lessons that come to mind are:

- Always have 2 backups (not counting the primary copy), at least 1 "cold" (inaccessible without human intervention) and at least 1 offsite. Backup frequently and retain old backups. With backups, bad decisions are reversible.

- With btrfs or zfs, using a collection of 2-disk mirrors was useful because it provided flexibility (to expand the array, just add another pair of disks) and seemed to have better performance than a single disk. Try to pair disks from different manufacturing batches though. I saw two disks from the same batch and _used in the same mirror_ fail in the same month, which was disconcerting.

- The only data corruption I had to deal with was from RAM that started off good and went bad after a couple years.

- Standardizing on btrfs or zfs from the beginning would have allowed backup by sending snapshots, which would have been a lot easier than cobbling together a solution using rsync.

- Scrub on a regular schedule. Set up monitoring software to notify you of the outcome of each scrub and of any SMART errors.

[j1elo]

Thank you. I need to start small, otherwise I feel overwhelmed by too many moving pieces to keeo in mind and plan for.

So I'm starting small, from powering up a ThinkCentre M910 I had laying around, with an internal disk that can be used to store backups. I have 0 need for performance so my idea was to extend storage with an external USB3 HD enclosure. For now, I don't have the space nor the machine where to install dual hard disks for building a decent RAID. Time will tell.