I've got 6 "drives"--4 of them are actually arrays and then I have an old machine that backs up most of that stuff besides.

Windows doesn't care. The only tricky part is getting file sharing to work when drives are mounted in folders and you want to share the folder. (The idea was to use up only one letter on my backup space.)

Correct. It's simply a tradeoff between power use and access speed. Bearing wear is a minor factor with a modern drive.

Thank you for the mention of Crashplan, CPRich!

I was unaware of Crashplan, but it definitely looks good. A FAQ claims unlimited online storage and no upload throttling.

I use Carbonite, which also has an "unlimited" storage plan but which throttles uploads after the first 200GB. It took me about 2 years to get ~450GB uploaded to Carbonite.

The major downside of Crashplan, as I (a non-user yet) see it, is that you can't download an individual file from your uploaded archive. [Update: As per gfunkdave and SNA1K, you can download individual files. That is great news! I began the free 30-day trial period a day and a half ago, and (after setting my computer to never sleep) it looks like Crashplan is uploading a little less than 20GB per 24 hours.]

Sure you can - from the system app or from the website.

Beware that Crashplan's customer support team is staffed entirely by morons who have apparently never even heard of Crashplan. I exaggerate, but only a little.

I've been using it for a year or so now and an quite happy - and you can't beat the price.

gfunkdave...interesting that you had that experience. After about two months of dealing with Acronis' Tech "Support", all with very Indian names, email-writing grammar, and telephone accents, none of which could answer my very simple problem satisfactorily, I subscribed to Crashplan. I had a very similar situation with Crashplan but it was answered by Tech Support the first time and within about two hours. I've been very happy with them, support, speed, etc. I did try Carbonite in between but quickly found out that I could not store my family video files there without subscribing to some $150+ a year plan. Dumped them and went to Crashplan.

And yes, I have downloaded individual files from them multiple times.

I don't like cloud storage for a number of reasons that I won't go into here.

Everything depends on just how "safe" you want to be. I have 2 3TB Raid 5 NAS devices sitting on my gigabit LAN. One is primary LAN storage, the second mirrors the first. In addition, I have a 3 TB USB drive sitting on a thin client at work that is connected to my home LAN via VPN. Once a night, critical data files files are backed up to the work machine. The only exception to the nightly backup are music files (I compose, mix and record, and uncompressed 96 khz, 24-bit audio takes up a LOT of room) -- they're just too big backup over the internet. For those, I backup after every session to a 3 TB portable USB drive in a shock-mount case that travels in my computer bag. Both USB drives are USB 3.0 -- if I ever need to restore from them, I can do it relatively quickly.

A long time ago, when I had an IBM XT with a 20 megabyte hard drive, I failed to back up a show I was working on and lost the original performance data forever (fortunately, I had recorded the audio to 8-track analog and since have been able to digitally remaster, however the MIDI data, from which I could modify the performance is, gone). Ever since then, I've been rather paranoid about losing data. Though my system is a little more complicated than the norm, it could be duplicated for well under $1,000 and offers triple redundancy: (1) RAID 5 contemplates the loss of one drive without losing any data, (2) the mirrored NAS contemplates the loss of the first NAS, and (3) the off-site storage of key data, combined with shock-mount portable USB drive, contemplates the loss of my entire home computer system.

For more security (worrying about theft or damage) I would do a monthly backup on a cloud somewhere. Also, shutting down and starting up drives over and over again IS worse than just letting them run. It will shorten their lifespan but won't cause any other damage... but again, it wont hurt running 3 drives on your machine

I'll describe my setup and maybe it can work for you.

I don't bother with any kind of cloud storage. I travel a lot for work and the internet in many of the places I go to is too slow to make cloud storage of any use. It's kinda funny as I commission undersea fiber optic communication cables. Also, cloud storage is of no use when I am home as I have access to all my data locally.

So, I have a 4-Bay Synology Network Attached Storage in my house hardwired to a Gigabit switch. I currently have 4x 1TB WD Black drives in there (thinking of upgrading to 3TB Reds soon) in a RAID 5 configuration that gives me almost 3TB of usable space. The server is very easy to setup and maintain with a nice GUI on top of the stable Linux OS, has some cool apps for it on both iOS and Android, and allows for trouble-free local or remote operation. You can setup remote access to the unit and it has some nice features like a VPN server, so you can have unrestricted internet in the Middle East and China. I have an encrypted folder on the drive for all my really personal files (taxes, personal photos etc...)

My PC is actually my work laptop. It has its usual hard drive in it, but I also took out the DVD-RW drive and put in another hard drive dock with a 256gb SSD that I use as my personal drive. When I boot, it defaults to the work drive, but I can press F12 during the boot to choose the SSD in the DVD-RW slot. This allows me to travel with one physical laptop that is actually two in one (work and personal). An added bonus is that I am not on the hook to maintain/pay for any of the possible components on the actual laptop that can and probably will fail (RAM, Screen, Keyboard, ports, etc�) On my personal drive, I have a Truecrypt encrypted container with my personal files that I want to have access to. I also carry a 1TB WD Blue 2.5" hard drive and have a special cable for it that connects to the combination USB/eSATA port on my laptop. As my laptop doesn't have USB 3.0, this allows me to have a higher speed external storage solution. I store my music and another larger encrypted container with all my photos/videos.

When I am at home, I connect to the LAN via hardwire and I store all my music, pictures, etc� on the NAS device. I just stream all my files and it is pretty speedy as the NAS is a high performance one and I can get 90-100 MB/sec on large file transfers. I also have an external eSATA dock that can connect either to my NAS or my PC for connecting external drives. The NAS performs more duty at my home by allowing for shared folders for my family to backup to as well as streaming movies and TV shows via DLNA to my local media player connected to my TV. It also has all the typical things you�d expect like an FTP server, website server, and photo sharing server. I have the NAS setup to register with a Dynamic DNS service, and then I have my own website (www.myname.com) setup to re-direct various sub-domains to different ports or other services on my server. For instance, if I go to http://download.myname.com, it launches a web-based GUI file sharing service by going to http://myname.no-ip.org:7000 <- the port for the file sharing service. It has some even more advanced services that I don�t use such as management and remote viewing of multiple IP cameras on your LAN as well as integrated web blogging/PHP/other website software.

With the NAS, I am protected from having a single drive fail due to the RAID 5 configuration. I have it set to run daily quick SMART tests on the drives in the middle of the night as well as weekly extended SMART tests every week so that I am protected against silent failures/bad sectors. It is set to e-mail me if there is an issue so even when I am away I will know if there's a bad drive that needs attention and an advanced RMA that can be waiting for me upon my return. Also, it is connected via USB to my UPS battery backup, and set to both e-mail me of a power failure and gracefully shutdown if the power failure is >5 minutes.

For data backup, I have a portable hard drive that�s fully encrypted that I backup all my and my families personal photos and files to. My TV shows and Movies are not backed up, as it�s not a huge deal if I lose them. I keep this encrypted drive in the trunk of my car in the parking lot and this is my �offsite� storage for data. If my house burns down, I�m covered. If my car is stolen, I can replace the drive and no one can access my files. If my house is broken into, my NAS stolen, my car stolen, and all of that � I am pretty boned I guess.

TLDR; 4-Bay RAID 5 NAS, encrypted HDDs and Containers, car trunk portable HDDs backup.

I just discovered that it's possible to use Crashplan on some Synology NAS devices. The one at my parents' house is backing up as we speak. ^