While a Drobo or RAID array will go a long way towards providing a fail-safe backup solution, in addition to the possibilities of fire or natural disaster that have been mentioned, the following points should be kept in mind:
1)Although unlikely, it is conceivable that all of the drives in an array can be simultaneously corrupted or damaged, by failure of the surrounding controller circuitry, or failure of the power supply that is powering the drives, or by virus infection.
2)If at some future time the controller hardware were to fail, and the same or a similar controller were no longer available, depending on the RAID mode that is used the data on the hard drives may be unrecoverable, even if the drives and the data on them are intact. RAID mode 1 (simple mirroring) is an exception to that.
3)Although incrementally uploading files to an online backup site, as the files are created, will be fast and convenient for those having fast internet connections, if ALL of that data ever has to be downloaded for recovery purposes it may take a LONG time. For instance, downloading 1000 gigaBytes of data via an extremely fast 30 mbps connection, such as I have, would take approximately 70 hours, or even longer if the computer at the other end (at the site) is not fast enough to avoid limiting the download speed. More typical USA connection speeds would increase the 70 hours to several hundred.
My backup procedures for anything important are simply to copy it to multiple external drives, that are connected to different computers and located in different parts of the house. I should keep one of them offsite, but I haven't bothered to do that.
I also use a drive imaging program to create image files of the main internal hard drive in each computer (the drive containing the operating system and program files), so that I don't have to reinstall, update, and set up all of my software if that drive were to fail. I store the images on multiple internal and/or external drives.
Regards,
-- Al
