how to sort out HDDs backup/important data storage

[kefan77]

first, the setup

PC1: SSD + 500GB
PC2: SSD + 750GB
N54L: SSD + 2x 2TB + 3TB + 2x 500GB
USB 2.0 External 1TB

What I want

I'm planning on purchasing 1 more 3TB, so N54L will be SSD, 2 x 2TB and 2 x 3TB
I want to get rid of External and the unneeded smaller capacity HDDs

what would be the best solution for backing up the most important data?
atm all HDDs are about 70-80% full, except that 3TB, which is brand new. before purchasing the second, identical, I was thinking of RAID1 for those and putting the important data there.

Any better ideas?

 

[Grrrrr]

Be careful not to confuse backup with redundancy. RAID 1 will only help if a drive dies not if you accidentally delete something.

There are hundreds of solutions to your question, so see what others suggest but this is my current setup

For backup I'd recommend looking into crashplan. You can save backups locally for free and with that you can restore data from any moment in time. For a subscription you can backup to their cloud.

For redundancy I use Drive Bender to pool all my storage drives into a single volume and then have the software duplicate all files across different drives. So if 1 drive goes pop Drive Bender can recover missing files from the duplicates. This solution also means you can keep adding more drives to the pool indefinitely, RAID is a little less flexible.

For my OS drive I have a Windows system image scheduled to run once a week to another hard drive.

 

[Minstadave]

I'm also using drive bender on WHS. Office 365 gives 1TB of cloud storage which I keep as a second line backup for important stuff.