Remember, RAID is not a backup.

(If you have to choose between the two, I would recommend going with a backup that you can disconnect from the computer.)

I am not made of money, even though that'd be awesome. I don't have enough cash to keep extending my storage space + provide a secondary backup. Yes, it's a good idea to have a backup of your backup but... not economical.

Tomorrow's top tip.. fire can hurt you.

In all of my 22 years of PC gaming I've only ever had one HDD fail on me, and that may very well have been of the self-inflicted variety - I'm damn sure it was. I typically end up replacing hardware before it even has a chance to go screwy on me.

I do not trust to HDDs. Too complicated (controllers, shocks, temperatures, grease viscosity). And it is very expensive to restore information from HDD and flash memory (SSD, USB sticks), while programs to retrieve info from optical media are widely available.

DVD, Blu Ray (simple BD-R and M-DISC) are better for long-term storage (write and store for 10-20 years, or even more, then back it up on next-gen optical discs). Just don't scratch them (don't insert into old dvd/bd drive as well - they might scratch surface) and don't put under the sun rays.

Discs + program like WhereIsIt to maintain catalogue, and you'll be good.

It is part of the process. The raid array allows a useable set of disks that can be restored if 1 or possibly more depending on setup fails. So that is one level of cover. Of course you need timepoint backups, onsite and offsite.
That's very dependant n what you do with it and how.
Optical discs are ok. They can be scratched, warped, broken etc. And they have a pretty low storage capacity. For instance how many blue rays would it take to store 4tb? And is it workable when things update fairly regularly?

Some people don't have unlimited bandwidth, or their speeds aren't great enough to make it feasible over using flash drives and external storage.

RAID does not protect against disasters like "rm #-rf /" (without the # sign that I added for safety) or malicious code deleting important files; the RAID controller/software will happily propogate the deletion to the other drives in the array.

A similar thing happened to me. HDD went kaput, and even though I had some form of a backup, I ended up loosing about 10% of all my files. Not overly important ones, but still a bitch to lose. So now I've got an external drive that I sinchronize weekly with the HDD, and I've got a seperate backup of the most important files. Although with my luck, all three might spontaneously combust one day.

A year ago or so, I checked dozens/hundreds of old CD-R (and DVD-R) discs I had, some of them more than a decate old. Maybe 10% of them had errors on them (originally they worked because I routinely always checked that my CD-R backups work when I originally burned them), so I am not trusting optical media as a reliable and long-lasting backup method, at least the writable ones (pressed retail CDs may last longer).

Also HDDs are generally just much easier to use because they can carry much more data (e.g. one HDD instead of dozens or hundreds of CDs/DVDs), and are rewriteable by nature so keeping the archive up to date is also easier. I don't consider the rewriteable CDs/DVD-RWs as they are even more fragile than non-rewriteables.

Also, with HDD backups the idea is not necessarily that you will keep the data on the same HDD for decades to come. It is very easy to simply copy over all your backuped data to new hard drive, when hard drive sizes just keep rising. So if I had e.g. some archives on two older 300 GB hard drives, by now I had probably already copied them over to a newer 2TB hard drive (and then some). Easier than copying from 100 CD-Rs to a Blueray.

Wasn't long ago that a had HDDs fail, now keep two HDD back ups and one SSD with the most important stuff on.
May change the other HDD to SSD when the price drops further on the larger ones.

Saying that i don't need to backup all the gog collection. most of it i won't touch again...

Mounted backups were never safe. I'm not even sure it was ever accurate to refer to those as backups.

Services like crashplan and backblaze are great for people that don't have data caps though.

Why you store them yourself? Discs are not ok for the job of course. But for photos, documents they are better than hdds, in my opinion. I've written above why.

If you're so paranoid about it, you can download your collection file by file, compute theirs MD5/SHA{1,256,512} and delete them afterwards. In dire times you can download all the files from torrents (or any other source you'll manage to find) and make sure they are legit.
Optical media is still better in this regard. A simple scratch will not destroy all files on the media, just a part of it. And you can mitigate the damage by writing same set of files to two optical discs, so chances that both will be damaged (or exactly same sector on optical disc) are much less.

I agree that this method is not suitable for storing hundreds of gigabytes of data. But it is good enough (and much better than hdd, in my opinion) to store photos, documents.

Are there any better backup options than blurays or HDDs. Tape drives look like they're aimed at business but at least they won't break as easily as HDDs if they get a knock.

Just out of curiosity, I noticed that people had mentioned "cloud backups". I remember reading something about some of the hard drive companies considering to offer secure cloud-backup storage, paid monthly like a utility in order to keep a backup of your drives (even as they change) offsite in the cloud.

Now, I was a little skeptical at first, but for a few years now I've been using DropBox for several years now, and to be honest, it's been pretty solid. Often I've used it to get to documents, videos, e-books, installation software, etc. not only from my phone, tablet and PCs, but I've used it when travelling on family's computers which had nothing more than a Web browser. Many years before that, I had to burn my data on CD and eventually thumb drives if I wanted to take it with me.

Now, while a different beast altogether than hard-drive backup, I think if they offered several terabytes of space for a reasonable monthly fee, provided extremely good encryption for data protection, a Web-based file-system to access and download data on demand, as well as some type of background restoration if you need to get a new drive, I would probably go for it.

Recovering from data loss (if you can recover things that weren't 'work product'), is typically many days of effort. Even more if your applications are digital downloads rather than physical media.