Having a Drobo or RAID or server set-up is good. The nature of your data is what should determine the solution though. For myself, I have 2 external 500GB drives, one acts as my primary file drive (using MBP with 160GB int) so all my music, photos and data reside there. The second 500GB is a back-up/clone which I run weekly. That drive basically sits on the shelf unplugged until I run the back-up. I know I'll out-grow this set-up soon, but thats okay. Although it's tempting to buy the biggest drive available to have plenty of room to grow, you should really buy only what you need for the next year or two. That 2TB drive will most likely be 1/2 the cost in 2 years and if you only are at 1TB in 2 years, you just wasted your money. Plus, for safe & secure archiving, I recommend refreshing your drives every 2 years, which you can step up to bigger drives for a lot less than they cost before. Although drives are rated & warranted for longer, the costs of recovery & loss of data are reason enough to be overly cautious.
There's still one big problem with most home back-ups, risk of physical loss. Any number of things can happen from fire to storms, theft to spilt coffee. I feel if you're the type that absolutely wants to know there data is preserved no matter what... okay short of alien invasion or global Armageddon.... off-site back-up storage is key. Obviously you need to find not only a reliable, fast & secure service, but one that will be in business in 5 years (re-evaluate options about then, who knows what new technologies will bring). Personally, I'm looking at Amazon S3 storage since they aren't going anywhere soon, they have an amazingly huge, secure and redundant server network, and its cheap! There are many ways to get your data on to S3, choose which work best for you, but the core solution is S3. Of course, any online back-up requires a good high-speed connection, although a few I've seen allow you to do the initial back-up via a hard drive which you run directly on your computer, send the drive to them and they transfer the back-up to their servers. After that, the following back-ups are much smaller. Hopefully, Comcast and others WON'T start limiting & charging for bandwidth like they're testing in Texas.
There's still one big problem with most home back-ups, risk of physical loss. Any number of things can happen from fire to storms, theft to spilt coffee. I feel if you're the type that absolutely wants to know there data is preserved no matter what... okay short of alien invasion or global Armageddon.... off-site back-up storage is key. Obviously you need to find not only a reliable, fast & secure service, but one that will be in business in 5 years (re-evaluate options about then, who knows what new technologies will bring). Personally, I'm looking at Amazon S3 storage since they aren't going anywhere soon, they have an amazingly huge, secure and redundant server network, and its cheap! There are many ways to get your data on to S3, choose which work best for you, but the core solution is S3. Of course, any online back-up requires a good high-speed connection, although a few I've seen allow you to do the initial back-up via a hard drive which you run directly on your computer, send the drive to them and they transfer the back-up to their servers. After that, the following back-ups are much smaller. Hopefully, Comcast and others WON'T start limiting & charging for bandwidth like they're testing in Texas.
