Hi, currently I have a almost none backups and I want to change them. I have a PC with Nextcloud on 500gb ssd that I also use for gaming (1tb system drive). Nextcloud would be used to store/sync images, documents, contacts, and calendar from my phone and laptop. I also have an old pc that has 2x 80gb, 120gb, 320gb, and 500gb hdd. I want to use it for other backups like OS snapshots, programming projects, etc. but its not a big hdd but a lot of small hdds. Should I store each backup on 2 drives? Can I automate this? Any suggestions would be helpful.
Thank you for your detailed response! I will checkout JBOD arrays, if that wont work I will probably buy newer larger disks.
JBOD here just means “show me this bunch of old drives as a single drive/partition”. It’s just a recommendation to at least get something out of these drives - but don’t use this as backup storage , these drives are old and if a single one fails, you lose access to the whole array.
If you’re not sure what to do with them, just get an USB/SATA dock or adapter, and treat them as old books: copy not-so-valuable stuff on them, and store them in a bookshelf with labels such as
Old movies
,Wikipedia dumps 2015-2022
…Definitely get a good, new drive for backup storage. And possibly another one for offsite backups.
btrfs has this built in with additional redundancy, so that is by far the better option to combine multiple drives into one large pool.