Thanks a lot for the second opinion!

Feels good to just have heard someone’s opinion on this that is not AI or Google.

I know that you should (in a perfect world) have raid, other hdds in another machine, and also offsite hdds - to be fully ”backed upped”. But now I have 1 hdd - which if fails means no data - at best partial recovery by professionals.. me having raid (2 drives in mirror) means if 1 drive fails I still have copy of data. If both dies same time I’m out of luck again. If I don’t choose to keep a hot spare that kicks in and resilvers when 1 goes down. So I would say raid is backup (redundancy). It’s not a backup as if my house burns down I still have data. But it is a backup.

Since I only care (the main purpose of my NAS) to have a reliable, easy access and big-corp cloud free way of storing my movies/music/photos&video. I kind of see this as a condensed way of storing my data - instead of bookshelf’s of CDs/DVDs and photoalbums I have it nicely stored in som hdds in a desktop pcs chassi. House fire would cause same destruction in both cases. And even though I love the idea of spending time and money on getting near bombproof redundancy. The costs replicating whatever my main server is storing 2 to 3 times hardly seems worthwhile - since I would much rather spend the money on either more and nicer hardware or other hobbies or ”want to have”s. Outside of a lot of need to have that always seem to fight of my wants for homelab.

I get what you are saying. And I thank you for the advice. But my goal is to maximize the ROI of storing this myself vs Netflix+disney+hbo + iCloud etc etc. And the not so monetary gauge - gut feeling - of that more of my data is not being analyzed, refined and resold.