What I usually do is the following:
- Use 2 drives for the system: 1st for OS, 2nd specifically for important storage
- Bought a cheap $15 docking station for IDE/SATA external hard drives (eSATA connection)
- Got account at Smugmug to "dump" copies of my photos ($50/year)
I wanted to implement a RAID 1+0, but never got to buy a controller card. I use Smugmug for online sharing as well, so the $50 cost doesn't bother me as much. And this gives me an option to have my files off-site in case of fire/earthquake or PC simply stolen.
You can have 2 major scenarios:
1) Your internal HD is down. In this case, you'll go back to your local archives to restore.
2) Your local equipment is all gone, and you have no access to it. In this case, you can go to online archives.
That is considering that your provider gives you at least 10mbps downstream / 1.5mbps upstream.
This saved me a need to keep my disks off-site, and rotate every now and then.
P.S. Disaster Recovery is like 2nd nature to me - I'm an IT DR consultant
Eventually, I will need to rely on the 750gb raid 1 device.
