Should I spread data across multiple drives?

Looking for a little advice and was wondering if anybody on here could help me out. I have a dedicated media drive full to the brim of TV shows and the likes, and it's starting to fill up. I have two 3tb drives with one acting as a backup, and now I'm wondering where to go next.

For the sake of future proofing and hopefully never worrying about running out of space, I was eyeing up an 8tb Seagate drive on Amazon. It's a little under £200 so it's far from cheap, especially seeing as I'd be buying two for the purposes of backing it up. In my opinion, this is the most convenient option as I can have one drive next to my TV and have the backup nestled safely elsewhere.

But then I started to wonder what'd happen if one of the drives died. It'd set me back another £200 for a replacement. That's when I started thinking about buying multiple 3tb or 4tb drives and splitting the files between the two drives. It might not save a whole lot of money to begin with, but if one of them died, I'd be spending a fraction of the cost of an 8tb drive to replace it. The problem with that setup is having two (or possibly three) drives hooked up to my setup, and then another two or three nestled somewhere, taking up space and using up more power.

Are there any practicalities or impracticalities I'm overlooking with either theory? Or does anybody have an even better solution that I haven't considered?

P.s. I'm not considering any NAS setups simply because of the paranoia about the NAS itself failing and killing the drives. I have a 8tb My Book Duo in RAID 1 that I keep my things on and was fairly content with, until I heard a story of somebody's drives dying because the actual enclosure had failed, so now I'm planning on buying another drive to back that up with. So a NAS would be useless if I still have to buy another drive to back the NAS up with in case the NAS fails... you see where I'm going.

I deal with this as part of my job and I always say every time the issue of backups comes up:

"If it's that important to you, back it up and back it up again. Your backup is only as good as your last one."

Get the biggest size drive you can afford to back up to. It will usually be cheaper to buy one 8Tb drive than 2 4Tbs for example.

The price may not matter in the future because what tends to happen is as 8Tb drives become mainstream, the price will fall - £200 is the early adoption price as it's so new. The price may not fall as cheap as 500Gb drives are now (though those on their own are now as cheap as 40Gb drives were many years ago) but it will fall.

Why not do it with USB?

USB Flash drives are not reliable. Especially for long-term storage. Personally I wouldn't even go there. You break the USB connection on them or the internal storage packs up and nine times out of ten they are absolute toast with no recovery options. They're cheap for a reason - good to take documents to and from home/work, and hold stuff that if you lose, it's not a major disaster. PITA occasionally but not the end of the world.

The arrangement in the video may have uses (an interesting one I spotted in its comments) but beyond that...

Your advice is appreciated, thank you!

I use crash plan, it's an online backup storage option which may be slow to initially back up but from then on only backs up new/modified files and best of all if you drive does fail you can request a physical drive with your data to be posted to you.

I'm very dubious about online data storage. Everything on my Dropbox account is USB stick-level of importance. Nothing I'd want lost or stolen.

On line storage is one of those things that is dependent on the provider. If the provider goes under or something else happens to it, you (may) lose the lot. Megaupload is a prime example, having been "confiscated" by the FBI.

I think Megaupload became infamous for hosting pirated material. Most of the cloud hosts have upped their game a bit, I use Mediafire and once I backed up some MP3's and they wouldn't allow some of the tracks on there, so they have some form of detector to see if the content is legal or not.

Deposit boxes in banks are full of USB flash drives but flash memory is not recommended for long term storage. Even storing data in flash memory for a year is risky.

My recommendation if you have tons of video material is to invest in a tape drive to create master backups then store the tapes in a safe place like a fire resistant safe or a bank vault.

I think the suggestion for archival of video content is to store them on LTO or similar tape formats in multiple locations, and to migrate the tapes frequently to new formats (much easier in the data tape domain than the broadcast tape domain) to ensure the content is readable on a modern format. Stuff you need to access should probably be available either on disc arrays or a more immediate data tape system.

When digitising SD content, do it losslessly, when digitising HD content I suspect you need to use a high quality codec (or in the case of shows delivered as files, the original DPP file essence should be retained)

A cheap and cheerful (and relatively low power) solution I use myself - I picked up an old Dell FX160 from ebay (these were sold as 'tiny desktops' but are basically glorified x86 thin clients). It doesn't have much grunt but it is completely silent and very low power). This has an internal 120GB SSD, with a small 8GB partition running standard Windows 7 and the rest as a larger data partition. Connected to the box are two cheap USB enclosures, once has a 4TB hard disk in it, the other (currently) has a 1TB drive and to save power (and noise) the hard disks only spin up when actually in use, whilst the box itself is low power and up all the time.

All of these drives are shared on the network. All my documents are stored on the data partition on the SSD (for speed of access) and overnight a batch file makes a full backup to the 1TB drive in case the SSD should fail.

Meanwhile, all of my media (presently almost 3TB) is stored on the 4TB drive, whilst the second hard disk is used for incremental backups as new things are put on the main drive (I've already got the rest of it on various other old hard drives so I do have a full backup). Once that drive is full, I'll pull it out, put it on the shelf with the other backup drives and put in another cheap 500GB/1TB drive to use as my next incremental backup.

The plan is that eventually once the 4TB drive is outgrown it will become a full backup itself allowing the older smaller backup drives to be withdrawn and a new larger main drive to be fitted (and I'll then start new incremental backups on other small drives - hopefully at least 2TB backups by then), starting the process again).

The end result is a pseudo NAS/RAID style solution without the expense of a real one and which also has the added benefit of everything being stored in an entirely standard format where I can just bung any hard disk into any computer and get my data off; unlike a 'real' solution isn't going to suddenly become difficult to access without the rest of the system being in place.

The fact that most of the backup isn't live and so can be easily made physically secure is another bonus.

Not exactly an enterprise-class solution (particularly since backing up the media drive is a manual process), but it does mean I've got all data stored in two places, catastrophic failure of any single component cannot cause data loss and I don't need any special hardware/software to recover from the backups. Even the box running the show itself can be swapped out without any real fuss.