Yes, i think we agree, it’s just the level. The post I replied to only had one drive, and I would imagine most people are like that, if they even download at all. A decent raid box can be £200, add on some hard drives, it gets expensive quick. Simply having two cheap e thermal drives, one external and you copy between is really cheap and easy compared.

Don't forget Blu-rays for backup.

I wouldn't bother with the support tards. Find their data controller or the address for legal matters and send a formal GDPR request.

To me, it's about the algorithm, not the name. A single drive with 3 or 4 partitians is a makeshift ("logical," as opposed to physical, since we call partitians logical contigious arrays logical disks) RAID (you might even be able to do this in linux by addressing the particians instead of whole drives, but i don't have a spare lying around to try it), at a huge speed cost and no protection against motor failure and damaged board. It can still fail at the motor (unfortunately, this is the most likely thing to occur), but there's also things that can be done about that (not that anyone's going to). Most others will hiave their problems solved by democratizing the partitians, out of the next so many most likely problems.

I've thought about setting up the system before, since i'm one of those that doesn't have the money for a full raid (hell, you should see the potato i call a gaming computer, which should be priority at this point). The problem is, because of how my income situation is at the moment, I got my new hard drive as of running out of disk space, so despite wanting that setup (logical raid) it's not an option for me, yet. I have some small old hard drives in a box somewhere that I could use to see how hard it'd be to set up, though.

Less can go wrong with them, but it'll go sooner. Also you have to consider the frequency at which you're going to be doing backups (updates, new games, special saved data). Not as likely to have the motor problems, though. I expect the disks will be subject to disk rot fairly quickly, though.

Combination of far more important things happening in my life, and lack of trust in Polish institutions to handle this any differently than the trade commission that decided GOG was completely innocent of misleading investors with the Cyberpunk kerruffle (despite hard evidence to the contrary).

CDPR is a darling in the eyes of Polish government, as a smokescreen of "look, homegrown success" over all the foreign entities leeching money out of Polish economy (and the fun ways to use licensing to ensure you can show constant losses on your highly profitable business is a subject I won't go in detail right now). To the point where a copy of Witcher 2 (IIRC) was the official state gift to president Barack Obama.

Perhaps things have changed. I'm still rather unconvinced Polish authorities have particular interest in adhering to the letter of EU law, though, but that could be just projection of my cynicism cultivated elsewhere.
I wouldn't call the people I've interacted with over the years "tards." They are intelligent, and know what they are doing, just in this case it's something completely opposite to MY interests.

Anyway, took a look at UODO (the Polish enforcing agency) and will see how that path works. A bit convoluted procedure is required (can't do it via e-mail without digitally certified signature because why make it easy /s).

Had an interesting talk with an acquaintance, though. He's specializing in divorce law, but hangs out with a crowd that includes several people practicing corporate law, so looking forward to the chill-out evening next week.

Anyway, thanks for ignoring something as simple as allowing people to access the games they long paid for without datamining dickhattery, GOG. At least it gave me a side project to pursue.

Your biggest mistake is either assuming that government officials aren't playing the stock market, or in assuming that they'll work against their own interests. Usually those on the higher end create the problems and either invest in winnings or losses. It's worse than insider trading, but instead it's insider trading with power and influence. I can say this confidently regardless of political party. You don't see many poor politicians.

Using several disks in a RAID array for backups will always be worse than using each individual disk as a regular backup target.

Their seems to be a common mistake with RAID: this is a technology targeted at high availability, not backups. If you are not making money from the availability of your hard drive contents, RAID is almost never what you are looking for.

If bit rot is the kind of issue you are worried about, the answer is again not RAID but filesystems providing checksums.

File systems providing checksums inform you of damage to your backups, but do not provide recovery.

That’s not a problem, since you did not stuck all your disks in a RAID array you still have at least three copies of said file to replace the faulty one.

IF you make 3 copies ,but that's not what you suggested.

Moreover, multiple disks are used as "software raid" when configured by the OS and is not more cost effective.

You said to use at least 3 disks in a RAID array for backups. I answered that it is better to keep them as distinct backup targets.

3 backups + 1 original - 1 corrupted = 3 remaining good copies of the corrupted file ;)

Definition of RAID does not require a physical cabinet with several drives all then connected through a single port and managed by a separate device. The whole focus is on redundancy of (optionally) hardware and data storage. The idea is to also take advantage of software solutions to common problems that have been encountered over the years, such as bit rot and the like. If all 3 devices are affected, but the corrupted sectors are all different (which none of the 3 have intact data on a single file), you can still recover the data by selecting the data that agrees at the sector level. Of course, you run into a problem if you encounter a sector that all 3 drives have unique versions of, but that's why you'll find people using large numbers of disks.

For example (we'll simplify multi-kilobyte sectors into individual bytes just for example), we have these disks below:

Disk 1: 8a 4d 58 de a7 de 0d f0 ad da 0d f0 bd de

Disk 2: 8f 4d ad de ad de 3d f0 ac de 0d f0 ad de

Disk 3: 8a 4d ad 6e ad de 0d f0 ad de 0d f0 00 7c

Real Data: 8a 4d ad de ad de 0d f0 ad de 0d f0 ad de