I use unraid which checks parity every week. I do back up important stuff like photos. However all of my work is in the cloud now and to be frank if my music went poof, I probably wouldn’t really care at this stage, most everything I want is on streaming services nowerdays.
I have run a number of RAID systems over many years always using RAID 1 to effectively duplicate important stuff. But experience of upgrading systems and the very occasional drive failure led me to realize that the raid systems were often less reliable than the disks themselves.
My biggest mistake was to rely on the Microsoft software raid in windows 10 only to find it broken beyond recovery in windows 11. My music collection now exists on 3 separate systems two of which are effectively updated through Xcopy or through manually copying when I make an addition.
All other important documents and recorders are backed up on a monthly basis via my own scripts because I have no faith in the many other software tools which come and go and insist in running in the background when not required. Now that I have a large number of spare old electro-mechanical hard drive I find that a sata disk caddy is a convenient way of saving files then storing them off-line.
The latest storage medium being M.2 NVME brings great benefit in terms of speed and relatively low cost but I am not banking everything on the reliability of this very new technology for indefinite storage.
I used to have an off site backup until I fell out big time with my X wife
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I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one that is backing up data on to mutiple external systems. I have 2 NAS RAID 1 Synology drives and many external drives, this means that all my data is on at lease 3 different drives. Management of backups is very easy as I have used Carbon Copy Cloner for years. This automates all different types of backups and I have recovered from complete system disk failure in a matter of minutes from a daily clone drive. It was said to me about thirty years ago “the effort you put into backups reflects how valuable the data is to you”.
Copying rips is pretty easy. Unitiserve SSD rips to one NAS, then I just copy to the other locations. The NAS backups happen automatically every night.
As mentioned above is sometimes not the disks that fail nut the NAS unit itself, when I lived in Alberta Canada it was so dry that I did suffer from the odd dry count in some appliances including a couple of WD NAS units.
Tim
When I worked on IT projects I always ensured there was enough time spent on Backups as well as Restoring - unfortunately as time went on, Restoring was always put on the back bench. Carbon Clone/Super Duper is a good idea for a quick restoration. My last restoration was from Time Machine on a 2009 iMac, which was 100% successful, but took over 7 hours.
Hi - I also have 2 onsite ReadyNas’s and one off site (set as x-Raid, so one disk is redundant) - I also back up my music, pictures/videos and documents to a SSD USB drive that is then also backed up to the cloud. I use a company called Backblaze in the USA - the cost is very competitive. About $50 per year for unlimited data.
I just had to replace one of the HDDs in my Readynas as the failed sector count was increasing day by day. If you have a NAS, I recommend to always have a spare disk handy in case you need it quickly.
Lastly, as I have MacBooks, these all backup to a Time machine - this is invaluable as I have had to restore from the Time Machine a couple of times - it sets your computer to exactly where it was. Much simpler than Windows.
Im probably over doing it.
J
I use my NAS for photography as well as music. I run RAID6 on one and backup to another NAS also running RAID6. Plus another backup to a non-RAID set of disks 
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So far I haven’t manged to find a cloud backup provider at a low enough cost for my ~12TBs of data!
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