Recovery

Use RAID for availability, not as the only backup

Plan the primary NAS and recovery copies as different jobs. The backup has to be reachable when the primary array is not.

Name the failure boundary

Drive failure, accidental deletion, malware, hardware failure, and site loss are different events. A storage plan is complete only when each important data set has a recovery path.

Keep copies independent

An external drive, second NAS, or remote destination can be independent. The exact choice depends on data size, restore time, and location risk.

Test a representative restore

Choose a file set, document the steps, perform the restore, and record the result. A green backup job is not the same as a usable recovery.

Continue planning

Turn this storage question into a capacity baseline.

Use the planner to make growth, bays, redundancy, and recovery capacity visible together.

Map protection gaps

Recovery proof

Test a NAS restore before an incident

Data protection

Use snapshots and replication for different jobs

Editorial record

Maintained by Make Your Own Tools to turn “Store data safely” into a defined capacity, bays, redundancy, and recovery baseline. The references below provide the technical context for this planning path. Its calculation rules and planning assumptions are documented in the methodology, and affected calculations pass regression checks before the review date advances.

Last reviewed
Evidence set
2 primary references
Read methodology →View change history ↗
Planning scope
Personal, homelab, and small-team storage planning.
Next check
Carry each failure boundary into the selected backup destination, retention, access, and restore procedure.
CISA ransomware guideIndependent backups and recovery-testing guidance.Open source ↗TrueNAS replication tasksPlatform documentation for snapshot replication and backup workflows.Open source ↗