[archagon]

Maybe for the enterprise. What about home use?

About a month ago, I had 4 drives scattered around the house, each in its own enclosure, and I wanted to consolidate them into one unit. Money was an issue, so I wanted to recycle as many of them as possible instead of buying new ones. A Synology NAS along with a single extra drive allowed me near-optimal use of space with 1-drive redundancy. Of course, I have weekly backups to an external drive, so even if the array fails during a drive swap, I'll still have all my important files.

Any other solution would either require me to buy more drives (a significant expense at $100+ a pop), sacrifice redundancy, or build my own NAS with ZFS (which would have significant administration overhead, cost more, and be larger than my Synology unit).

[mbell]

Backing up to an external drive isn't enough if your really worried about the data. If your house burns down, or the single backup drive fails, your out of luck.

Synology's devices support automatic backup to S3, use it.