Backups Wireless and prepared for failures

[Dobsalot]

Hello everyone, recently me and my girlfriend went on holiday and it got me thinking about the videos and pictures I have of my family etc. I don't really know much about backing up so I thought I would come here and ask.

I'm looking for someway I can keep all my pictures, videos etc safe on hard drives. I heard a lot of stuff about RAID? but I'm not sure exactly what that is. I need to be able to have my stuff copied onto the hard drives at the same time so if one hard drive ever dies I can receive it from the other and replace the dead one. Is there some sort of unit I can buy?

Does anyone have any recommendations? I don't need anything too fancy just someway to make sure my pictures are safe. Not too expensive either please.

I'm not interested in online storage like the cloud.

Thanks

 

[kanewolf]

You could get a single or dual disk network storage (NAS) unit. Even if you use RAID (dual disk RAID 1) you still want to have a backup strategy. RAID only protects from a disk failure. It does not protect against human error (deleting or overwriting), virus, etc. A good network storage unit will have a USB3 port which you hook up an external drive. Alternately, you can setup a dual disk unit to backup from one drive to the other.
Don't think of RAID as a perfect safety net. You still need backups. You CAN use network storage AS the backup medium for your primary computer. That creates multiple copies, which will protect the data.

 

[Dobsalot]

You could get a single or dual disk network storage (NAS) unit. Even if you use RAID (dual disk RAID 1) you still want to have a backup strategy. RAID only protects from a disk failure. It does not protect against human error (deleting or overwriting), virus, etc. A good network storage unit will have a USB3 port which you hook up an external drive. Alternately, you can setup a dual disk unit to backup from one drive to the other.
Don't think of RAID as a perfect safety net. You still need backups. You CAN use network storage AS the backup medium for your primary computer. That creates multiple copies, which will protect the data.

So I need to look at NAS units? Will the usb 3 port backup to the external?

 

[kanewolf]

I like NAS because it is always available. My PC wakes up from sleep in the middle of the night, does a backup to NAS and goes back to sleep -- All while I am also sleeping. My NAS has my music for play on the home theater. It could have movies, but I don't. There are lots of things a NAS can do to simplify your system admin chores and it is available to all devices on your network.

You can setup a job on a NAS unit to backup to a directly connected USB device.