Is this a sane backup strategy to reduce clutter?

[GLTirebiter]

I’ve got a tangle of USB cables and drives on my desk and I’d like to simplify things into one drive enclosure. I need about 12 TB on an external HDD for media files (Plex, Music) which includes room for growth. Speed is not all that critical as, at worst, it will be serving up video files. And, I need Time Machine backups for the 2 TB internal SSD on my M1 Mac Mini.

The idea is to get a four-bay enclosure, and create a 12 TB HFS+ partition and a 4 TB APFS partition on each drive, The primary media disc would copy to the second drive a couple of times a week (changes are infrequent). Time Machine would back up hourly to the two APFS partitions.

A hot-swappable third drive would be copied over weekly and stored off site.

The fourth bay would go unused, or as a small scratch disk.

With the primary aim of preserving my media files for playback, is this reasonable? If so, any hardware recommendations would be welcome.

Thanks!

PS: In addition, I use OneDrive for all my Mac documents. I’ve considered Backblaze as well instead of the offsite disk, but with this amount of data (currently 10 TB) uploading could take forever.

 

[JamesMay82]

Sounds good but where are all your movies/media files from? If they are from iTunes purchases then i probably wouldn’t go to the expense of keeping them backed up Because they are always in the cloud. I use to keep downloading mine and it just became to expensive with the hard drives, plus you need a 2nd drive of 10Tb etc to back That drive up.

I just use 2 LaCie 2 Big which has been fine for me, they are both in raid 0. 1st drive houses all my larger files that wont fit onto the internal i.e. photos library’s etc and the 2nd drive is a Time Machine backup of the first LaCie and all the internal drive.

 

[GLTirebiter]

Sounds good but where are all your movies/media files from? If they are from iTunes purchases then i probably wouldn’t go to the expense of keeping them backed up Because they are always in the cloud. I use to keep downloading mine and it just became to expensive with the hard drives, plus you need a 2nd drive of 10Tb etc to back That drive up.

I just use 2 LaCie 2 Big which has been fine for me, they are both in raid 0. 1st drive houses all my larger files that wont fit onto the internal i.e. photos library’s etc and the 2nd drive is a Time Machine backup of the first LaCie and all the internal drive.

Thanks for the reply. They are ripped DVDs and even VHS tapes, and some of it pretty rare.