That would certainly be the easiest and if for no other reason other than time, I may utilize a hardware solution but am wanting a large amount of data storage for family pictures, videos, centralized music library, movie library etc. What back up software do you use or is it Time Machine?
In regards to family photos, videos etc, maybe I should take advantage of a cloud service as the accessibility, redundancy, resiliency, affordability etc. would almost assuredly be better than anything I could employ at home on a non-professional budget. I could focus my at home NAS around a size of say, 4T with its intent being hosting a centralized music catalog, movie catalog and a modest catalog of vintage osx/classic/win software.
Well, I will just lay out my backup scenario.
I use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up each Mac to a sparse disk image inside a backup folder on my NAS. Those are daily backups and each Mac is set to do it's own. I use disk images because with SMB sharing things tend to get wonky with sparse bundles.
On my Mac Pro I have a 3TB drive that is where my Dropbox folder resides. I pay Dropbox $28 monthly for 4TB of space (yes, I need to get a 4TB drive). Anyway, I also use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up each Mac to another sparse disk image inside a backup folder in my Dropbox folder which is on my MP's 3TB drive. These are WEEKLY backups and they are all scheduled to go off on the weekend (Friday to Sunday). I use disk images for the same reason as above, plus Dropbox tends to treat sparse bundles as separate folders. That makes restores fail most of the time - so disk images. Again, this is done by each Mac.
So, each Mac has a DAILY and a WEEKLY job using CCC.
Now, Catalina, doesn't seem to like CCC backups of APFS SSDs to network drive images. So, I use Time Machine on my wife's Air and on my MBP. That goes to the NAS on TM's schedule.
The lone PC I have uses a different app and makes weekly backups to that Dropbox folder on my MP. It's weekly because I don't really use the PC, so I don't need it to backup over and over the same stuff on a daily basis.
The idea here is that should a drive on one of my Macs ever fail and God forbid, the NAS fails (which has my daily backups), there is a
BACKUP ON DROPBOX!
I lose a week worth of data should this ever happen, but at least I do not lose everything.
EDIT: My NAS and backup locations…
Now if everything else fails AND Dropbox also fails, then I think the techworld has a much bigger problem on it's hands.
That is highly unlikely.