HDDs can fail too. I'd probably use a Raspberry Pi + SSD if putting it at someone else's house, since they will both be very quiet. I have a 14TB HDD at my house for backups, and it's pretty noisy.

If you really want redundancy you can use a mirrored array but for one backup of multiple I probably wouldn't, especially if there's a cloud backup in there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Is that mirrored array referring to RAID?

I literally have no knowledge in this stuff. Once you have something like this setup, how does it work? Once you configure it, does it automatically backup files in a certain location on your computer?, or do you manually move files onto it that you want to backup?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Oh man I'm gonna show my lack of knowledge too 🙂. I'll try anyway, but take everything I say with a grain of salt.

There are different types of RAID, but I believe RAID 1 would be a mirrored array. This Lemmy instance is on a ZFS mirrored array, but that's handled by the host so I don't have to understand it 🙃. I am not sure if the ZFS mirror is considered RAID but it's basically the same thing as RAID 1 (perhaps one is hardware one is software based?)

I see this setup as more of a redundancy for a live system so it can continue with one of the drives after a failure without downtime, and I probably wouldn't consider the mirrored drive a backup. But I'm no expert!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I always mean to do some more research into the topic, and never get past that stage lol. Maybe this time will be different... maybe.. lol