Consumer hardware setup for long-term backups?

Question

The iCloud development has gotten me thinking about my usage of major cloud storage solutions, including Dropbox. I've been getting increasingly annoyed with Dropbox's product changes lately anyway, so I'm thinking about setting up my own solution.In terms of size, half a terabyte (or maybe a terabyte to be comfy) would do. My main priority is durability: I don't want to worry about a drive failure (durability is the main reason I've used Dropbox for so long; my house could burn down and my data would be safe).Presumably I should go with an SSD for durability (?) seeing how sensitive HDDs are to movement/magnets/mechanical failure in general. Should I bother trying to do some kind of RAID redundancy setup, or is that overkill? Any other thoughts or suggestions? All-in-one backup solutions would also be interesting, as would cloud storage solutions that are end-to-end encrypted.

LinuxBender · Accepted Answer

In my opinion, unless you need high speed backups, I would not worry about SSD. Rather, I would get several external USB3 drives and label them by day or week. Then alternate external drives to back up to. To keep multiple versions of files, you could use rsnapshot which is just a perl script that does some fancy linking of identical vs changed files to save space. [1] All drives fail, no matter how expensive they are. If you have multiple drives and multiple backups, then you can even store one offsite somewhere, just in case. There are plenty of free tools for each OS to do disk encryption on the USB3 drives.[1] - https://github.com/rsnapshot/rsnapshot