Storage + Backup Solution (External HDD for Photos, Time Machine, iCloud, Synology NAS, Backblaze)

That looks pretty good to me.

Time machine to synology works if you set it up carefully according to the instructions. I ran it for about 2 years. The only reason I went back to an external USB drive for time machine was to free up space on the synology. On that basis, I'm not sure I'd use raid 10. Raid 6 will give you protection against 2 drives failing simultaneously, and only cost you two drives of storage. Raid 10 will cost you 3 drives of storage (with your 6x8TB you'd only have 24TB of online capacity).

Remember - Raid is not backup - as you've acknowledged by including BackBlaze.

By the way - with synology I used SHR (synology hybrid raid)

The only other question I'd ask is can you afford to upgrade your 2TB working drive to SSD. It will make a huge difference to performance.

MasterMonk wrote:

Hi Apple Community,

I had a critical drive failure recently (luckily I recovered using a Cloud backup) and in an effort to design a better system, wanted to get the advice of this forum. I have a large library of family media~2TB, 100k+ files that I want to keep as secure as possible.

Seek any and all advice / thoughts / recommendations!•

The way I have thought about this is:

(iMac) For applications

...

• (Cloud Backups) BackBlaze + iCloud for Apple Photos

One more thing to note - iF you are using iCloud Photos, it is not a backup. All you get is an off-site storage, but no archival history. You need still a backup of your Photos Library, as iCloud is only storing the current version and if you make errors, while working with the photos, there will be no way to recover from that error, as all user interactions will immediately sync to the iCloud version. Time Machine can include the Photos Library, but you have to make sure, that the originals have all been downloaded from iCloud. The Time Machine backup will otherwise be incomplete - don't use "optimise Mac Storage", if you are backing up your Photos Library with Time Machine or cloning software.