I have a pi4 running on an ssd over usb3 with a usb3 dock that has 2x2TB drives for storage.
At the moment I have mainly music on one and mainly video on the other, with important stuff on both and elsewhere.
Is it sensible to combine 2x2TB hdd’s via usb3 dock into a 4TB filesystem/pool/volume/thing…and if so can I have tiered storage so if one drive fails the other will have a mirror of important stuff?
RAID1 would be a stopgap against a certain type of failures but it’s not a solution for accidental deletions or failures that affect both drives or the whole machine (fire, electrical, theft).
Redundancy is mostly a solution for continuous availability, which is not something most home-users care about that much (but if you have private self-hosted services that are super critical for you you may want to reconsider your approach).
You should start by taking inventory of your truly important files, figure out how much space they take overall, then start doing proper backups for them. That means taking regular snapshots on some different media. That media can be another HDD, or it can be optical discs (Blu Ray is better than DVD but it may be a matter of cost where you live). If you use a HDD there are specialized backup software like Borg Backup that will deal with deduplication, compression etc. for you. And you have to verify your backups regularly as well – Borg will allow you to do it easily, with optical discs you can use recovery parity checksums (with par2).
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RAID1 would be a stopgap against a certain type of failures but it’s not a solution for accidental deletions or failures that affect both drives or the whole machine (fire, electrical, theft).
Redundancy is mostly a solution for continuous availability, which is not something most home-users care about that much (but if you have private self-hosted services that are super critical for you you may want to reconsider your approach).
You should start by taking inventory of your truly important files, figure out how much space they take overall, then start doing proper backups for them. That means taking regular snapshots on some different media. That media can be another HDD, or it can be optical discs (Blu Ray is better than DVD but it may be a matter of cost where you live). If you use a HDD there are specialized backup software like Borg Backup that will deal with deduplication, compression etc. for you. And you have to verify your backups regularly as well – Borg will allow you to do it easily, with optical discs you can use recovery parity checksums (with par2).