Yup, at minimum you’d need another NAS off site (say, at a friend’s house) so you always have a copy. I have my NAS in a mirror to ensure I can recover if a drive fails, so that would mean 4x the cost of whatever storage size you need if you want to ensure your data stays safe.
Just some quick math, a WD Red Plus 10TB drive costs $190. So that’s $19/TB, and they have a 3-year warranty (used to be 5), so let’s assume they last 3-5 years. I need four drives minimum (two sets of mirrors), though if I have a lot of data and drives, that’ll go down (e.g. if I can use RAID 5 or RAID 6, I need less parity):
19 * 4 / 3 = $25/year
19 * 4 / 5 = $15/year
So $15-25/year, or $1.5-2/month, which comes with a few caveats:
can’t easily expand storage (e.g. can’t just add 1TB), so need to overbuy; I have 8TB storage, but use less than half of that, so probably double the above cost
this ignores PC costs, which can be hundreds every few years to replace aging components (esp PSU and RAM); ideally get ECC RAM to reduce risk of bit rot
There is a crossover point at which self-hosting is cheaper, but if you only need 1-4TB of storage, something like Backblaze is going to be cheaper. But as you get bigger, the NAS looks more attractive.
Yup, at minimum you’d need another NAS off site (say, at a friend’s house) so you always have a copy. I have my NAS in a mirror to ensure I can recover if a drive fails, so that would mean 4x the cost of whatever storage size you need if you want to ensure your data stays safe.
Just some quick math, a WD Red Plus 10TB drive costs $190. So that’s $19/TB, and they have a 3-year warranty (used to be 5), so let’s assume they last 3-5 years. I need four drives minimum (two sets of mirrors), though if I have a lot of data and drives, that’ll go down (e.g. if I can use RAID 5 or RAID 6, I need less parity):
So $15-25/year, or $1.5-2/month, which comes with a few caveats:
There is a crossover point at which self-hosting is cheaper, but if you only need 1-4TB of storage, something like Backblaze is going to be cheaper. But as you get bigger, the NAS looks more attractive.