mrvelous1 wrote:

....

By the time go through with all of these recommendations you will have
effectively built yourself a Data Center.

Not really - perhaps you got confused by the length of the explanations
to the point that you lost track of their substance.

And at what cost? Maybe
you should consider augmenting a simpler cheaper solution with some of
these online services that offer a cloud model, where you backup your
data to their servers and they are contractually obligated to insure
your data safety. This gets you the ability to restore in case you rm
the hell out of it (brain cramp), restore in case of theft or damage
(beer spill), and pretty much insures that if you upgrade your
hardware, or are unable to get a replacement drive or RAID card, that
you have an offsite/offline solution to get the data back.

The cloud model is attractive in some regards (e.g., ease of use and,
when your backup needs are limited, cost), less so in others. You'll
probably want to back up to at least two different cloud vendors to
guard against the possibility that one will suddenly cease to exist
(especially when dealing with a low-cost - or even free, for small
volumes - cloud vendor, since this end of the market hasn't even begun
to shake itself out yet). And good luck finding a vendor (especially a
low-cost one) who will come anywhere near guaranteeing your data's
safety (another good reason to use two of them) - which is not to say
that some don't take very reasonable precautions to protect your data,
just that they're not stupid when it comes to 'contractual obligations'.

By the
time you are finished with all the fault tolerances these folks have
kindly suggested, you may have very well paid for years of an offsite
backup already...

Unlikely, since the least expensive suggestion that satisfies all the
criteria mentioned above is simply to archive to at least one off-site,
off-line set of media (which you periodically verify are still good)
while retaining an on-site copy as well if you don't choose to replicate
the archived data to a second off-site location. This also gets around
the need to use RAID in any form in your archive, thus avoiding Ralph's
concerns about low-end RAID implementation quality.

- bill