I can't tell you what works for "you", but here's my setup, with the hope it inspires someone: - Live data lives in the cloud. I could self host it, but it wou

I can't tell you what works for "you", but here's my setup, with the hope it inspires someone: - Live data lives in the cloud. I could self host it, but it would always be inferior to the cloud offerings, and usually more expensive for my ~3TB data. - I make local backups nightly - I make remote backups nightly to another cloud. - Once every week I make a local backup to a device that is offline 6/7 days a week (an old Synology NAS that powers on automatically, and powers off when it's been idle for 30 minutes). - Every year I curate our photo library and burn a set of M-Disc Blu-Ray copies of all photos created or modified in the past 12 months. Two identical sets, one stored at home, the other stored at a remote location, each clearly labeled "Photo Backup <year>". - Every year I also update a couple of external HDDs with the entire photo library, again identical copies, contents are verified yearly and updated, and stored again. Disks are also clearly labeled as "Photo backup". As others have written, curate your data. In my case we have a 2.5TB photo library spanning a couple of decades, but that could easily have been 4TB without curation. I only backup documents in the nightly/weekly backups. (Personal) Documents usually only hold value for a short time, and after that it's mostly sentimental. Anything media, or anything downloaded from the internet like books, music, etc, regardless of if I purchased it or pirated it, is not getting backed up. If it came from the internet, there's a good chance it can still be found on the internet. I also (mostly) don't run RAID. RAID is for availability, and since all my important data lives in the cloud, and I will likely survive if one of my backups dies, there's little reason to run raid. The only exception is the share where PhotoSync backs up our photos, which is on a "small" RAID1 volume mainly because it acts as the source of all the other photo backups, so consistency and correctness is important.