Backup Strategy - Off site

[fxk]

Due to recent failures of two external disk drives recently, I realized just how at risk all my data is. What bothers me is that one was a NAS w/ imbedded Linux and it was the enclosure electronics that failed - and the drive had been formatted as some type of Linux partition.

I now have a two-drive NAS that I have set up for mirroring, but I still worry about the enclosure electronics failing.

As my "working" Lightroom drive was an external drive, when it failed (a week after the NAS failed) I found myself without access to about a year's worth of photos.

With my paranoia ever growing, I also realized I had no off-site storage in case of theft or site disaster (flood, fire, etc.).

So, I'm nearly paralized with fear right now. I don't trust enclosure electronics, especially in the fact that they are propriatary (at least in the case of NAS or RAID arrays), single drives are very vulnerable, and optical media seems now not to be the 100 year life it was touted as having - in fact, some optical media can become unreadable in a matter of weeks. AHHH!!!!

So, my plan is to have as my "working drive" a firewire 800 DROBO, being backed up to my mirrored NAS - but what do I do about the off-site storage? A single large drive rewritten weekly? Four gig per DVD disk just does not cut it for backing up a couple hundred gig, and then there's the longevity factor.

So, the questions boil down to these:
DROBO as a main "working" drive - yes - no - do I need to keep an additional DROBO in a box just in case the drobo itself takes a dump?
Mirrored NAS - I'm comfortable with the data backup, but there is that damn enclosure electronics again - do I need one of those in a box, too?
Off site - I'm looking for any suggestions here. Maybe take the "backup" drobo or mirrored NAS and keep them off-site. HELP!!!
(I also posted on FM - if you helped already, thanks.)

[Gum6y]

Depends on the volume of data we are talking. Do you have a WAN link to a remote site. What sort of transfer times can your current setup support.

If it was me weekly backups would be sufficient but everyones requirements are different like companies.

[tim]

Seems like you're going from a rather poor setup to something that's overkill, and still has most of the problems of your existing setup. Standard internal drives are faster than a drobo, they're cheaper, and rarely fail. Just back it up to a standard external drive formatted to NTFS or FAT32 in a standard USB enclosure, keep them offsite, and back up once a week. If you're doing anything critical have an 8GB flash drive and keep it in your pocket when you go out.