| Well data protection is expensive, nobody said the contrary. Backup what you value the most, ignore what you don't and apply tiers depending on what needs to be kept but you can deal with transferring it back home slowly and what you need immediately in case of a failure. My rules of thumb are: - always invest 3x the price of your hot live NAS storage in backups. If you can't afford buying 40TB of storage, you can't afford having 10TB of live storage. Period. Goal is to have at least one copy locally and one externally and have more space to on the backup storages to account for retentions, changes and help with migrations. - if you can't afford 3 redundant storages(RAID), favor having 3 times non redundant storage (no RAID) over having less copies of redundant one. Additional tip to reduce cost and avoid expensive cloud offering is to find a reliable and trustable relative or friend that can host your external copy of your backup. Nebula or Tailscale now makes it very easy without having to configure routers and stuff. In exchange you can offer that person to host his/her backup storage. Also digitalizing material stuff is nice, but printing digital photos is also a great way to preserve copies. I'd rather save the photos I cherish the most than having 3 backup copies of 10TB of blurry or non outstanding photos. After years of having them all digitally, I am inveting back in printing photos and making albums. You can also print photobook multiple times and have some stored at a relative's place. |