I have a 2 bay NAS, and I was planning on using 2x 18tb HDDs in raid 1. I was planning on purchasing 3 of these drives so when one fails I have the replacement. (I am aware that you should purchase at different times to reduce risk of them all failing at the same time)
Then I setup restic.
It makes backups so easy that I am wondering if I should even bother with raid.
Currently I have ~1TB of backups, and with restics snapshots, it won’t grow to be that big anyways.
Either way, I will be storing the backups in aws S3. So is it still worth it to use raid? (I also will be storing backups at my parents)
@Atemu @beastlykings Every few decades seems optimistic. I have an archive of photos/videos from cameras and phones spanning from early 2000s to mid-2010s. There’s not a lot, maybe 6gb; a few thousand files. At some point around the end of that time period, I noticed corruption in some random photos.
Likewise, I have a (3tb) flac archive, which is about 15-20 years old. Nightly ‘flac -t’ checks are done on 1/60th of the archive, essentially a scrub. Bitrot has struck a dozen times so far.
Interesting. I suspect you must either have had really bad luck or be using faulty hardware.
In my broad summarising estimate, I only accounted for relatively modern disks like something made in the past 5 years or so. Drives from the 2000s or early 2010s could be significantly worse and I wouldn’t be surprised. It sounds like to me your experience was with drives that are well over a decade old at this point.