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)

  • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    Depends, how much do you value your data? Is it all DVD rips where you still have the DVDs? Nah you don’t really need raid. Are they precious family photos where your only backup copy is S3? Yeah I’d use raid for that, plus having a second copy stored elsewhere.

    Plus as others have mentioned there’s checks on your data for bitrot, which absolutely does happen.

    • Atemu@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      20 hours ago

      RAID does not protect your data, it protects data uptime.

      RAID cannot ensure integrity (i.e bitrot protection). Its one and only purpose it to mitigate downtime.

        • Atemu@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          18 hours ago

          ZFS and BTRFS’ integrity checks are entirely independent of whether you have redundancy or not. You don’t need any sort of RAID to get that; it also works on a single disk.
          The only thing that redundancy provides you here is immediate automatic repair if corruption is found. I’ve written about why that isn’t as great as it sounds in another reply already.

          Most other software RAID can not and does not protect integrity. It couldn’t; there’s no hashing. Data verification is extremely annoying to implement on the block level and has massive performance gotchas, so you wouldn’t want that even if you could have it.