I have a 2 bay NAS, and I was planning on using 2x 18tb HDDs in raid 1. I was planning on purchasing 3 of these drives so when one fails I have the replacement. (I am aware that you should purchase at different times to reduce risk of them all failing at the same time)
Then I setup restic.
It makes backups so easy that I am wondering if I should even bother with raid.
Currently I have ~1TB of backups, and with restics snapshots, it won’t grow to be that big anyways.
Either way, I will be storing the backups in aws S3. So is it still worth it to use raid? (I also will be storing backups at my parents)
It depends on your uptime requirements.
According to Backblaze stats on similarly modern drives, you can expect about a 9% probability that at least one of those drives has died after 6 years. Assuming 1 week recovery time if any one of them dies, that’d be a 99.997% uptime.
If that’s too high of a probability for needing to run a (in case of AWS potentially very costly) restore, you should invest in RAID. Otherwise, that money is better spent on more backups.