Reddit reviews OWC 2.0TB Mercury Elite Pro Desktop Storage Solution, 7200RPM eSATA/FW800/FW400/USB3.1

>Okay this whole time I thought RAID was a form of backup.

No. Don't ever let a sysadmin hear you say that. They will haunt you for the rest of the day repeating the phrase "RAID is not a backup." It's an enormous, huge thing that is drilled into the heads of anyone who has to manage a RAID system. RAID is NOT a backup.

Just because RAID protects you from failure of one disk in the array, but what happens if you lose two? Or three? What happens if your RAID controller pukes all over the data it's writing to the disks?

>But you're saying you need to have a whole separate drive as backup?

It doesn't need to be a disk, necessarily, but a second form of storage.

See, in the world of data protection there is a thing called the "3, 2, 1 Rule." Three copies of your data in two formats, one off-site.

Three copies means three copies. That part is straight forward.

Two formats means maybe one of those copies is on a RAID, one copy is a USB disk, or it's a USB disk and a tape backup, or just two different USB disks. The idea is that a disaster that could strike one format wouldn't affect the other. So in the case of a RAID array if the controller is toast it doesn't affect your ability to use a USB drive, because they use different interfaces.

One off-site means far enough away from where you normally work that it won't be affected by the most likely natural disaster. So if you live in an area that floods, maybe it's at your buddy's house in the next town over who lives on a hill. The idea is that if your office catches fire, or is robbed, or the building collapses, or the Dark Lord Satan opens up a portal to Hell right under your block, at least some of your data is safe somewhere else.

Your off-site backup doesn't have to be constantly updated, but it should be as updated as often as is reasonable. So for example I visit my parents every weekend. I could have two USB disks, one in my apartment, one at their house, and I could rotate them out every time I visit. So if someone robbed my apartment I'd only lose a maximum of one week's worth of work. But if I, say, had an office I worked at, I could keep one disk in the office and one disk at home, and then I would never be more than a day behind.

>Like this one?

That would be fine, but I think it's overkill. I mean, here's the thing: your primary editing drive needs to be fast, right? Because you have to work off of it. But your backup drive? It just has to sit there unless an emergency comes up. It's not meant to be a permanent work drive. So your backup drive is going to be subjected to a lot less stress and lower demands, so you could get away with a cheaper disk.

In fact, a good backup drive should be bigger, if you can afford it. Using a proper piece of backup software you can store versions of files. So as you write and overwrite files copies of each version are saved (up to a point, of course). So this comes in handy in case something happens, like you hit save, except Premiere writes a corrupted project file instead. You can use your backup to roll back one version older and recover most of what you had. The good news is that your source videos, which make up the bulk of your backup content, don't change that much, so you don't need a huge disk to do versioned backups. Most of what's going to change will be project files, documents, maybe some graphics or music you add. So a 3TB disk would offer way more space for versioning than you would need.

> Is cloud storage a feasible backup option?

Yes and no. A "cloud" backup could be viable as your off-site backup, but the problem is how long it takes to create your first backup. So how long will it take you to push an entire project's media up to the "cloud"? How long would it take you to download it all again?

That's the question you have to ask. If your projects are small, and you have a fat pipe, and you can afford the monthly fees then online backups are great off-site solutions, but for expedience sake you'll still want an on-site backup, IMHO.

Okay this whole time I thought RAID was a form of backup. But you're saying you need to have a whole separate drive as backup? Like this one? Is cloud storage a feasible backup option? Again, thanks for your help. I really appreciate it.