Are clouds an acceptable alternative to your own hard drives? -? Any? links to good hardware forums or pointers to external HDD enclosures? with? controllers that never go stand by?

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

On Fri, 2026-02-06 at 11:28 -0500, Robert Heller wrote:
> RPi's are cheap.  Nothing stopping you from having multiple "NAS"
> boxes.  
> RPi's since RPi 2's all have WiFi, so you don't need to string CAT6
> cables all 
> over the house (but if you want Gig speed access, you'll want the
> CAT6).  
> Whether or not you bother with RAID or not will depend...

I rolled my own backup setup with a combination of RAID drives using md
devices, BTRFS and rsync. I use BTRFS snapshots to keep a rolling daily
backup going back over two years. Total array size is 36TB with RAID5
protection. I recognize that this is not a true backup system, since I
am taking advantage of BTRFS's copy on write policies to save disk
space. I have had it up over two years without any data loss and I have
had to upgrade and replace several failed disks over that time period.

The server is in a separate building and the backups are done nightly
over Wifi. Since the server is only used for backups, the disks are
only active during the backup runs and spin down most of the day.
-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
System/Network Architect
voice: +1 480 922-7313
cell: +1 602 421-9005
smoot at tic.com