The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/r01pea on 2025-02-04 04:16:27.
Historically I've used MacBook Pros backed up to an external drive using Time Machine, + external SSDs holding a few TB of various media. I'm buying a newer ThinkPad P1 and moving to Linux, and now is a good time to take a look creating a more reliable backup routine. It seems simple, but to be honest I can read for a few hours and feel like I haven't learned anything.
I have my data on my laptop and the external drives I can restore data from, but after I experienced what an SSD failure looks like, I decided I want to have an additional HDD I can back everything up to. When I started looking at 3.5" enclosures, I came across RAID enclosures like the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual and it got me thinking about setting up a RAID 1 array as surely having my backups mirrored to a 2nd drive can't be worse than backing up to a single HDD. I have since learned that is not a good plan because of Reasons™ but I do plan to mirror my backup to a 2nd drive manually. I understand this doesn't protect me in case of a fire, but it does greatly reduce the risk from drive failure which is my main concern.
I should note the drives will only be powered up and attached during backups. After giving up on the idea of a RAID, I planned to buy a plain dual bay enclosure (or a RAID enclosure but use the drives individualy) for the 2x 8TB UltraStar HDDs I've already bought. But, basically every enclosure out there has reviews saying the drives started disconnecting randomly and that BOTH drives were suddenly corrupted. This is true for $50 on up to several hundred dollar enclosures and too common to ignore when the whole point is to help me rest easy.
My question is: what is going on with all these failures? Shouldn't it be harder to make a mistake so bad that all your data gets corrupted when you're just trying to make a backup? I haven't been able to find any good answers about this. I'd prefer a single enclosure to avoid double the cords and power supplies plus I imagine the speed is better transferring between the drives inside, but if 2 separate enclosures is safer I'm good with that. My needs are simple but I know a lot of the same 4/5/6/10 bay enclosures come in a dual bay version so hopefully someone has some good experience - is it that all enclosures use crappy controllers? Is there a reliable one out there?
I've been told you should always have a backup to be safe, but come on - this is the backup that I'm already making to be safe. It's not reasonable to need a backup for my backup for my backup, with the expectation that whole drives being corrupted is a normal contingency. I think I've planned out a solution that is better than average, and I'm confident there is a method that is "pretty darn good" even if I don't run my own data center deep within a mountain or something. So I'd appreciate any info/tips from those with experience!