Or do as I do with my NAS. Its a small unit holds 2 drives, costs under $200 US, has RAID1 activated, and has all the redundancy that Hardware raid offers. The additional costs are the size of the drives you need. Link -> Synology DS220j Network Storage - Newegg.com
With this you have all the control of the storage solution.
Yes, you have full redundancy from the raid and the Synology NAS's are great (the WD MyClouds are cheaper but you have to use WD disks). If the idea is to be able to recover your system in the event of a catastophic event to your computer and/or house, then the problem (unless I am missing something) with using a NAS for the "off site" storage is that the NAS sets on your network seen as a drive by W10 and is therefore susceptable to a malicious attack like ransom ware. In other words, the attack is going to get your NAS too. And because the NAS is in the same location as your computer it is susceptable to power problems like lightning strikes (yes, even with good surge protection).
Please help me out here if I am missing something.
Yes you are missing the point. If your system has data on it, that would be impossible to reconstruct with out a backup, In that case you need multiple backup copies. A single point of recovery is not good and that single point even though it has a Form a raid, it doesn't provide the a chance on total recovery (which also includes Cloud storage). For the best possible backup environment must include multiple copies of all backups.
My uber important data gets backed up to a set (Believe it or not) 3 USB 3.0 Verbatim memory sticks which are rotated every day. Even if I lose the current backup stick, the worse I would lose is today's backup. I can reconstruct today's data from yesterdays fairly easily. If my house is on fire, I can grab these sticks and throw them in my pocket as I run out.
For example, my whole system & data backups first get directed to a single backup disk (WD Black 10,000 rpm units for speed). The backup then gets copied to an external USB 3.0 Raid 1 backup unit ( has WD Black 7200rpm disks). Now I have plenty of redundancy on 3 separate disk drive units. There is no single point of failures here. Then this total backup set is migrated to 2 offsite USB 3.0 disks once a month which are needed to be recalled physically. One is kept locally in a fire proof safe, while the other is 4 miles away.
For pure system backup, I have added another SSD to my system where I'm backing up from SSD to SSD. Its quite fast as a FULL Backup takes less than 3 min. The weekly batch runs above also create a backup copy of my system only every time they run. Even though its only a single disk backup (Note all of those backups described above also have copies of the system disk). I only use this if I screw up the O.S., or M$ does with a bogus C.U.
Oh there is one more Data backup scheme that I use is that I also utilize Windows File history backups for KEY files. This happens multiple times a day
I feel I'm pretty covered (Probably over kill - But I used to be a disaster/recovery expert in another life). I have seen small and large companies brought to near bankcrupcey due to POOR backup strategies.
I hope this info helps.
Thanks storageman. You're absolutely right. You must have multiple copies of backups. Right now I have 2 copies of everything, one on an internal SATA6 drive and one on a removable USB attached SATA drive so I would grab that drive in the event of fire. Having determined that cloud backups will not work for me, I will need to set up a system like you're doing where I can rotate backup drives so there's always a backup drive disconnected from the system and safe from a malware attack. I will need to think this thru. Just an fyi: The incremental and full backups are all image backups. I can recover drives or individual files and even recover the system drive to different hardware which I have actually successfully done. So in the event of a mother board failure or just the decision to build/buy a new computer I can easily recover my system to the new hardware without having to reinstall everything. The Veritas System Recovery software is the forerunner of the old Norton Ghost that we used to use to image computers in a business environment. When Symantec absorbed Norton, Ghost became Symantec System Recovery before Veritas bought from Symantec.
You can also restore a Macrium image to a different config. Will require an effort to get the MS license straighten out and if there are different disk config will need attention, but it does work.
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